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hearth

UK/ˈhɑːθ/US/ˈhɑɹθ/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,679 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: hearths

The hearth is the stone floor of a fireplace, the old heart of a home. Sit by the hearth, sweep the hearth, hearth and home.

It was the one warm place in the house and the reason the family gathered in one room at all, which is why hearth and home became a set phrase for domestic life. In metalworking, the hearth is the floor of a furnace where the metal sits.

HOWI - Horsch, Willy · CC BY 3.0

Definitions of hearth

  1. 1nounhearthThe stone floor of a fireplace.C1

    “The cat lay curled up on the warm hearth in front of the fire.”

hearth is a floor.

Where it comes from

Old English heorth, from a Germanic root. German Herd is the same word and now means a cooking stove.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *kerh₃- — heat; fire

  2. Proto-Germanic

    *herþaz

  3. Proto-West Germanic

    *herþ

  4. Old English

    heorþ

  5. Middle English

    herth

  6. English, today

    hearth

From Middle English herth, herthe, from Old English heorþ, from Proto-West Germanic herþ, from Proto-Germanic herþaz, possibly from Proto-Indo-European kerh₃- (“heat; fire”). Cognate with West Frisian hurd, Dutch haard, German Herd, Swedish härd. The modern spelling is from an Middle English/Early Modern English, from earlier, levelled from inflected forms with where the vowel would have been lengthened. The reflex of this pronunciation was preserved in obsolete dialectal.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Around the House

Practise this word

hearth in the wild

  • A forge is a type of hearth used for heating metals, or the workplace (smithy) where such a hearth is located.

    Forge

  • In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Hestia is the virgin goddess of the hearth and the home.

    Hestia

  • Like Athena and Artemis, Hestia elected never to marry and remained an eternal virgin goddess instead, forever tending to the hearth of Olympus.

    Hestia

  • Vesta is the virgin goddess of the hearth, home, and family in Roman religion.

    Vesta (mythology)

  • Nonetheless, many homes still have hearths, which still help serve the purposes of warmth, cooking, and comfort.

    Hearth

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.