Host

How to spell host

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce host

What does host mean?

1. nounA person who receives or entertains guests in their home or at an event.
2. verbTo act as host of an event, gathering, or broadcast, or to store and serve data online.
3. nounA very large number of people or things.
4. nounAn organism in or on which a parasite or other organism lives.

Host in a sentence

• noun

  The host greeted every guest at the door with a glass of wine.

• verb

  The company will host its annual conference in a downtown hotel.

• noun

  The new policy raised a whole host of difficult questions.

• noun

  The tick must find a warm-blooded host before it can feed.

• noun

  As a generous host, she made sure no plate was ever empty.

• verb

  Our small server can host several websites at once.

Where does host come from?

Language of origin: Latin

English actually owns three words spelled 'host', and all three travelled in from Latin by way of Old French. The most familiar one, the person who receives guests, comes from the Latin hospes (stem hospit-), which curiously meant both 'host' and 'guest', the two roles of hospitality; the same root feeds 'hospital', 'hostel', and 'hospitality'. The second 'host', meaning a great multitude or army, descends from the Latin hostis, which originally meant 'stranger' or 'enemy' and later came to mean an armed force; from a marshalled army the sense softened into any large number of things. The third 'host', the consecrated bread of Communion, comes from the Latin hostia, meaning a 'sacrificial victim' or offering. All three entered Middle English between roughly 1200 and 1400 through French forms such as 'hoste'. Because every one of them collapsed onto the same four letters, the spelling is mercifully simple even though the meanings are unrelated.

How the word is built

• host (from Latin hospes 'one who receives guests', and separately Latin hostis 'army' and hostia 'sacrificial victim')