Homer

How to spell homer

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce homer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does homer mean?

1. nounIn baseball, an informal term for a home run.
2. nounA pigeon bred and trained to return home over long distances.

Homer in a sentence

• The rookie hit a homer in the bottom of the ninth to win the game.

• The breeder released each homer at dawn and timed how long it took to return.

• His three-run homer cleared the left-field wall by a wide margin.

• A prized homer can find its loft from hundreds of miles away.

Where does homer come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The everyday English word homer is built on the native Germanic noun home, which comes from Old English ham meaning a dwelling or settlement, plus the agent suffix -er. In baseball it is simply a clipped, informal way of saying home run, a hit that lets the batter circle all the bases and return home; this American sense became common in the early twentieth century. The same home-plus-er pattern also gave the name for a homing pigeon, a bird bred to find its way back home over long distances. Quite separately, an older homer appears in English Bibles as a Hebrew unit of dry measure, taken from the Hebrew chomer, which literally meant a heap and may originally have described a donkey-load of grain. These two strands have unrelated roots that happen to land on the same spelling, and because the proper name Homer (the ancient Greek poet) looks identical, writers sometimes pause over whether to use a capital letter.

How the word is built

• home (from Old English ham: dwelling)
• -er (agent/noun suffix)