Hometown
nounThe town or city where a person was born or grew up.
How to spell hometown
8 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce hometown
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does hometown mean?
- nounThe town or city where a person was born or grew up.
Hometown in a sentence
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She returned to her hometown for the school reunion.
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The band always plays a special concert in their hometown.
Where does hometown come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
This is a transparent compound built from two very old native English words. The first element, 'home', descends from the Old English 'ham', meaning a dwelling, house, or village, the same root that survives in countless English place names ending in -ham, such as Birmingham and Nottingham. The second element, 'town', comes from the Old English 'tun', which originally meant an enclosure or a fenced homestead before it widened to mean a village and then a sizeable settlement. The blend of the two as a single word for the place one was born or raised in is comparatively modern, taking hold in American English in the nineteenth century and spreading widely in the twentieth. Because both halves are plain Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, the spelling is regular and offers no Latinate surprises.
How the word is built
- home (dwelling, native place)
- town (settlement)
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