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How to spell home

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce home

What does home mean?

1. nounThe place where a person lives, especially as part of a household or family.
2. verbTo move or be guided precisely toward a target or destination.

Home in a sentence

• noun

  They bought their first home after years of saving.

• verb

  The missile was designed to home in on the heat source.

• noun

  Working from home has become normal in many industries.

• verb

  Investigators began to home in on the cause of the failure.

Where does home come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Home descends directly from the Old English ham, which meant a dwelling, an estate, or even a whole village or settlement. It belongs to the broad Germanic family, with close cousins such as Dutch 'heim' and German 'Heim', all pointing back to a shared root for a place where people settle and stay. The older English sense was surprisingly wide, covering not just a single house but the surrounding community, which survives today in English place names that end in '-ham', like Birmingham and Nottingham. Over the centuries the meaning narrowed to the familiar one: the place where a person lives and feels they belong. The spelling kept its single 'm' and a silent ending shaped by the long 'o' sound, which is why the word looks deceptively simple while sitting at the heart of countless compounds like 'homework' and 'homeland'.

How the word is built

• home (a complete native root; no prefix or suffix, from Old English ham 'dwelling, village')