Housewife

How to spell housewife

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce housewife

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does housewife mean?

1. nounA married woman whose main occupation is running her household rather than working for outside pay.

Housewife in a sentence

• After the twins were born she chose to be a full-time housewife.

• The magazine ran an article on how the role of the housewife has changed since the 1950s.

Where does housewife come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Housewife is a native English compound that goes back to Old English, formed from hus, meaning 'house', and wif, which originally meant simply 'woman' rather than specifically a married woman. The Middle English form huswif described a woman who managed a household, and by the late medieval period it had settled into roughly its modern sense. One memorable twist is that the contracted, clipped pronunciation of huswif eventually gave English the separate word 'hussy', which started out meaning nothing worse than a housewife before drifting toward insult. The spelling stayed transparent because both halves, 'house' and 'wife', remained common words in their own right, so the compound never blurred the way 'hussy' did. The familiar building blocks are exactly why the word is easy to reconstruct: you are simply writing 'house' and 'wife' side by side.

How the word is built

• house (dwelling)
• wife (woman, originally simply 'woman')