Other forms: households
A household is all the people living together under one roof. A household of five, household income, household name.
It is the unit statistics are gathered in, and it is not the same as a family — flatmates are one household and a family across two addresses is two, which matters for tax, benefits and the census. A household name is one everybody knows. Note that the compound is house plus hold.
1nounhouseholdAll the people living together under one roof.
“In our household, everyone takes turns cooking dinner.”
household is a group of people.
House plus hold, from the sense of holding or keeping a house. Dutch huishouden is the same compound.
Middle English
houshold
English, today
household
From Middle English houshold. by surface analysis, en + house + hold. Cognate with Scots houshald, housald, housell, howsell (“household”), Dutch huishouden (“household”) (earlier huishoud), German Low German Huushollen (“household”) (Middle Low German hūsholt), German Haushalt (“household”), Swedish hushåll (“household, family”), Norwegian husholdning (“household”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA