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housewife

UK/ˈhaʊs.waɪf/US/ˈhaʊs.waɪf/
nounB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #4,426 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: housewives

A housewife is a woman whose full-time work is caring for her home and family. A busy housewife, the housewife's day, she was a housewife.

The word is dated and some find it dismissive, and homemaker or stay-at-home parent are the usual replacements — partly because they do not assume the person is a woman. Hussy is the same word worn down, which shows how far a term can fall.

Alexey Vassilievich Tyranov · Public domain

Definitions of housewife

  1. 1nounhousewifeA woman whose full-time work is caring for her home.B2

    “My grandmother was a housewife who cooked, cleaned and raised six children.”

housewife is a role.

Also accepted in games: homemaker

Where it comes from

House plus wife, from Middle English houswyf. Hussy is the same word worn down in speech.

  1. Middle English

    houswyf

  2. English, today

    housewife

From Middle English houswyf, housewif, huswijf, equivalent to house + wife; a a doublet of of hussy, which it was long distinguished from and displaced due to gradual negative connotation (see [https://www.etymonline.com/word/housewife Online Etymology Dictionary entry]). Cognate with West Frisian húswiif, Dutch huiswijf, German Low German Huuswief, German Hausweib.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Family & People

Practise this word

housewife in the wild

  • The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a housewife as a married woman who is in charge of her household.

    Housewife

  • The British Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary defines a housewife as "the mistress of a household; a female domestic manager".

    Housewife

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.