Housing

How to spell housing

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce housing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does housing mean?

1. nounHouses and accommodation considered collectively, or the provision of them.
2. nounA rigid case or enclosure that protects and supports a mechanical part.

Housing in a sentence

• The council announced plans to build more affordable housing near the station.

• The engineer unscrewed the metal housing to reach the worn bearing inside.

• Rising housing costs have priced many young families out of the city.

• A crack in the plastic housing let dust into the hard drive.

Where does housing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word grows out of the Old English noun hus, meaning a dwelling or shelter, the same ancestor that gives us the everyday word house. Hus belonged to a wide family of Germanic words, with close relatives in Dutch huis and German Haus, all pointing back to a shared idea of an enclosed living space. The verb to house, meaning to provide shelter or to contain something, developed alongside the noun, and adding the productive suffix -ing turned it into a noun for the act or result of sheltering. By extension housing came to mean dwellings considered collectively, as in the supply of homes in a town, and later took on a concrete mechanical sense: a rigid case or frame that encloses and protects a part. The smooth, predictable spelling reflects its native English roots, with the single s sounding like a z, which is the one small point a writer might pause over.

How the word is built

• house (from Old English hus: dwelling, shelter)
• -ing (noun suffix denoting a thing or collective)