Housekeeper

How to spell housekeeper

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce housekeeper

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does housekeeper mean?

1. nounA person employed to manage the cleaning and domestic running of a house or hotel.

Housekeeper in a sentence

• The hotel housekeeper left fresh towels and made the bed each morning.

• After the surgery she hired a housekeeper to manage the cooking and laundry.

Where does housekeeper come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a transparent English compound, joining 'house' to 'keeper'. 'House' descends from the Old English 'hus', a general Germanic word for a dwelling that has cousins across the family in Dutch 'huis' and German 'Haus'. 'Keeper' is built on the verb 'keep', from Old English 'cepan', which originally carried a sense of 'to seize, to watch over, or to attend to', with the agent suffix '-er' marking the person who does the action. The combined term emerged in late medieval English and by the 1400s and 1500s referred to a person who managed a household, especially the running of the home and its servants. The modern sense, a person employed to manage the cleaning and domestic affairs of a house or hotel, settled in over the following centuries. Because every part of the word is written exactly as it sounds in everyday speech, the only real spelling decision is remembering it is a single closed compound rather than two words.

How the word is built

• house (dwelling)
• keep (to maintain, look after)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)