Housekeeping

How to spell housekeeping

12 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce housekeeping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does housekeeping mean?

1. nounThe management and routine maintenance of a home, including cleaning, cooking, and running the household.
2. nounThe hotel department or staff responsible for cleaning and preparing guest rooms.
3. nounRoutine administrative or technical tasks that keep a system, office, or operation running smoothly.

Housekeeping in a sentence

• She handled the cooking, cleaning, and general housekeeping for the whole family.

• She rang housekeeping to request extra towels and fresh sheets.

• The meeting began with a few minutes of housekeeping before the main agenda.

• After his back injury, the daily housekeeping became difficult to manage alone.

• The housekeeping staff serviced every room before the afternoon check-in.

• The script runs nightly to perform database housekeeping and clear old logs.

Where does housekeeping come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, built from the native Old English words 'hus', meaning a dwelling or house, and 'cepan', meaning to hold, guard, or maintain, which gives us the modern verb 'keep'. Both elements are firmly Germanic, descending from the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary that formed the backbone of everyday English. The pairing 'housekeeping' is recorded from around the sixteenth century in the literal sense of running and maintaining a home, including its food, cleanliness, and accounts. Over time the word stretched into figurative uses: by the twentieth century it covered routine administrative or maintenance tasks in offices, hotels, and computing, where 'housekeeping' means tidying up resources rather than rooms. Because every part is a familiar word, the only real spelling trap is remembering it is written as one solid word, with the single 'keep' supplying the doubled 'e'.

How the word is built

• house (dwelling)
• keep (to maintain)
• -ing (noun-forming suffix)