Other forms: houses, housing, housed
A house is a building made for people to live in. A big house, buy a house, next door to our house.
In British English a house is usually a whole building and a flat is part of one — home is the emotional word and house the physical one. The verb, pronounced with a z sound, means to provide space for: the museum houses the collection. House also names a business or institution — a publishing house, the House of Commons — and, in music, house is a dance genre. Note on the house, meaning free, and get on like a house on fire, meaning to become friends very quickly.
1nounhouseA building made for people to live in.~14%
“The house has been in the family for four generations.”
2nounbusinessA business or institution.~72%
“The publishing house was sold twice in a decade.”
3verbprovideTo provide space for people or things.~14%
“The old mill now houses a museum.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
house is a building to live in.
Old English hus is shared across all the Germanic languages, and its origin before that is uncertain. It has always meant a dwelling — one of the very few basic words that never seems to have meant anything else.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)kewH-
Middle English
hous
English, today
house
Built from
From Middle English hous. From Middle English hous, hus, from Old English hūs (“dwelling, shelter, house”), from Proto-West Germanic hūs, from Proto-Germanic hūsą (“house”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European (s)kews-, from (s)kewH- (“to cover, hide”). More at hose. Eclipsed non-native Middle English mees, meson, measoun (“house”), borrowed from Anglo-Norman mes, mies, meis, maisun (“house”). The uncommon plural form housen is from Middle English husen, housen. (The Old English nominative plural was simply hūs.)
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA