House
nounA building made for people to live in, usually for one family.
How to spell house
5 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce house
What does house mean?
- nounA building made for people to live in, usually for one family.
- verbTo provide shelter, lodging, or storage space for people or things.
House in a sentence
-
noun
They bought a three-bedroom house near the station.
-
verb
The council needs to house dozens of families before winter.
-
noun
The whole house needed rewiring before they moved in.
-
verb
The new wing will house the museum's rarest manuscripts.
Where does house come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
House comes from the Old English hus, which simply meant a dwelling or shelter, and it traces back to a common Germanic ancestor seen in the Dutch huis and the German Haus. The deeper origin is uncertain, though many scholars link it to a root meaning 'to cover' or 'to hide', which fits a structure built to shelter people from the weather. The word has stayed remarkably stable in form for over a thousand years, keeping its short, blunt spelling while many of its Germanic cousins drifted. One quirk of English is that the noun is pronounced with a hissing 's' sound while the verb softens to a 'z' sound, even though both are spelled the same way. That same hidden noun-to-verb voicing shows up in related pairs like 'use' and 'advice/advise', a leftover habit of older English grammar.
How the word is built
- house (single root, from Old English hus: dwelling)
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.