Other forms: homesteads
A homestead is a house and the land around it that a family works. A remote homestead, the family homestead, build a homestead.
In America the Homestead Act of 1862 gave settlers title to land they farmed for five years, which shaped the settlement of the west and dispossessed the people already living there. In Australia the word means the main house on a station.
1nounhomesteadA house and the land around it that a family works.
“The family built a wooden homestead on the prairie and farmed the land around it.”
homestead is a dwelling.
Old English hamstede, home plus stead, a place. Stead survives in instead and in bedstead.
Proto-West Germanic
*haimastadi — homestead
Old English
hāmstede — homestead
Middle English
hamstede
English, today
homestead
From Middle English hamstede, hemstede (attested in placenames), from Old English hāmstede (“homestead”), from Proto-West Germanic haimastadi (“homestead”). by surface analysis, home + stead. Cognate with Old Frisian hāmstede, hēmstede (“homestead”), Dutch heemstede (“homestead”), German Heimstätte, Heimstätte (“homestead”), Swedish hemstad (“homestead”), Old Icelandic heimstǫð (“homestead”). a doublet of Hampstead and Hempstead.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA