Skip to content
OneKitly

homeless

adjectivenouncommon in dialogue

  • United States//ˈhoʊmlɪs//
  • United States//ˈhoʊmləs//

Lacking a permanent place of residence.

adjective

  1. 1

    Lacking a permanent place of residence.

    Whenever I pass the park, I see the homeless people sleeping on the benches.

    You know what you never see? A really good-looking homeless couple.

    The massive arches of the retaining walls have become tent city for the many homeless people in the area.

  2. 2

    Containing no place that might be called home.

    But I should turn mine ears and hear The moanings of the homeless sea, ⁠The sound of streams that swift or slow ⁠Draw down Æonian hills, and sow The dust of continents to be; […]

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *ḱey- Proto-Indo-European *-mos Proto-Indo-European *ḱóymos Proto-Indo-European *tḱóymos Proto-Germanic *haimaz Proto-West Germanic *haim Old English hām Proto-Indo-European *lewh₁- Proto-Indo-European *lewHs-der. Proto-Germanic *leusaną Proto-Germanic *lausaz Proto-Germanic *-lausaz Proto-West Germanic *-laus Old English -lēas Old English hāmlēas Middle English *homles English homeless From Middle English *homles, *hamles, from Old English hāmlēas (“homeless”), equivalent to home + -less. Cognate with Dutch heemloos, Danish hjemløs (“homeless”), Swedish hemlös (“homeless”). Compare also German heimatlos (“homeless”), Icelandic heimilislaus (“homeless”), West Frisian dakleas (“homeless”, literally “having no roof, roofless”).

noun

  1. 1

    A person who is homeless.

    Oszlár Kálmán András, Yoga in the Bed: Tantric Continence & Spiritual Intimacy […] the jobseekers and homelesses or even the future prime minister, all of us are involved in formation of the new world.

    […] homelesses' due process rights and infringed upon the homelesses' fundamental right to travel […]

Forms

plural
homelesses
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).