Indoors

How to spell indoors

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce indoors

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does indoors mean?

1. adverbInside a building, rather than in the open air.

Indoors in a sentence

• The heavy rain forced the whole party to move indoors.

• On cold winter evenings the cat prefers to stay indoors.

Where does indoors come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grew out of the older English phrase 'within doors', which simply meant being inside the doorway of a house rather than out in the open. The core noun comes from the Old English 'duru', a door, which traces back to the same ancient Germanic root that gave German 'Tur' and is distantly related to Latin 'foris', meaning a door or gate. Over time 'within doors' was shortened, and the everyday pairing 'in doors' fused into the single adverb 'indoors', complete with the old adverbial -s ending that also survives in words like 'always' and 'towards'. The -s here is not a plural at all, even though it looks like one; it is a relic of that genitive-style adverb form, which is exactly why the spelling keeps the s on the end. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the closed-up spelling 'indoors' had become standard for meaning simply inside a building.

How the word is built

• in- (inside)
• door (the entrance of a building, by extension the building itself)
• -s (adverbial ending)