Homeowner

How to spell homeowner

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce homeowner

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does homeowner mean?

1. nounA person who owns the house or flat in which they live.

Homeowner in a sentence

• Every homeowner on the street received the new council tax notice.

• As a first-time homeowner, she budgeted carefully for repairs and insurance.

Where does homeowner come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent modern compound built from two long-established English elements, home and owner. The first part descends from the Old English ham, which meant a village, an estate, or a dwelling place, and which also survives in countless English place names ending in -ham. The second part comes from owner, an agent noun formed from the verb own, itself from the Old English agan, meaning to possess or to have as one's property. The two words were joined into the single noun homeowner during the twentieth century, especially as property ownership became a mass economic concern, and the spelling simply stacks the parts with no joining letter, which is the small trap: it is one solid word, home plus owner, not hyphenated and with no awkward doubling.

How the word is built

• home (dwelling, from Old English ham)
• own (to possess)
• -er (agent noun suffix)