Housed

How to spell housed

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce housed

What does housed mean?

1. verbProvided shelter or accommodation for people, or contained and stored something within a building or structure.

Housed in a sentence

• The converted barn housed three small workshops for local craftspeople.

• After the flood, displaced families were housed in a nearby community hall.

Where does housed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'house', which traces back to the Old English noun 'hus', meaning a dwelling or building for living in, a word shared across the Germanic languages and related to modern German 'Haus' and Dutch 'huis'. From the noun grew a verb meaning 'to give shelter to' or 'to store within a building', recorded in English well before the Norman period. One quiet point of interest is the sound change in the verb: the noun 'house' ends in a soft 's' sound, while the verb 'house' and its past form 'housed' end in a voiced 'z', a pattern English also shows in pairs like 'use' and 'used'. The spelling stays steady through all of this, simply adding '-d' to the silent-'e' base. Because the word is so old and so common, its spelling never strayed far, which is why 'housed' looks exactly like the base word with an ending tacked on.

How the word is built

• house (dwelling, to provide shelter)
• -ed (past tense suffix)