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household

nounadjectivecommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈhaʊshəʊld//
  • United States//ˈhaʊshoʊld//
  • Ireland//ˈhaʊshəʊld//
  • //ˈhɛʊshʌo̞lt//
  • //ˈhæʊshʌo̞lt//

All the persons who live in a given house or other home; a family including attendants, servants etc.; a domestic or family establishment.

noun

  1. 1

    All the persons who live in a given house or other home; a family including attendants, servants etc.; a domestic or family establishment.

    And calls, without affecting airs, / His household twice a day to prayers.

    Shih Hung-pi was born a pauper at a poor household in Suichung County, Liaoning. He suffered untold misery in the old society. Then he joined the PLA.

    Although I was a member of the royal household, I was not among the privileged few who were trained for rule.

    Nearly half of all renter households in the US were cost-burdened in 2023, meaning they paid more than 30% of their income towards housing costs, according to new government data.

  2. 2

    Entirety of work and management required to sustain the household.

  3. 3

    Legal or culturally determined unit of people living together.

  4. 4

    obsoleteA line of ancestry; a race or house.

    In thee thy mother dies, our household's name, / My death's revenge, thy youth, and England's fame.

Etymology

From Middle English houshold. By surface analysis, 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”).

adjective

  1. 1

    Belonging to the same house and family.

  2. 2

    Found in or having its origin in a home.

    Whether boarding an airplane with underwear on your face to protest mask requirements, injecting yourself with horse dewormer instead of a safe and effective vaccine or swallowing household disinfectants because the President of the United States unironically suggested that it might help, the pandemic has amplified the frequency and tenor of ridiculous and sometimes alarming behavior.

  3. 3

    Widely known to the public; familiar.

    a household word; a household name

    Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember with advantages What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words, Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester, Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.

Forms

plural
households
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).