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OneKitly

housekeeping

nounattested in dialogue

The chores of maintaining a house as a residence, especially cleaning.

noun

  1. 1

    The chores of maintaining a house as a residence, especially cleaning.

    Those who with us would have their own little housekeepings and cooking, have not the means, nor perhaps the taste, for such domestic comfort, and take their victuals at the trattoria, or cook-shop.

  2. 2

    The chores of maintaining a house as a residence, especially cleaning. Those workers of an establishment who maintain a house through cleaning, etc.

  3. 3

    Any general tasks that involve preparation.

    The computer program does some general housekeeping involving initializing variables and opening files before beginning the main processing.

  4. 4

    Announcements that must be made before a show or event can begin.

    Thank you all for coming! Just some quick housekeeping before we get underway, the emergency exits are to your left...

  5. 5

    Hospitality; a liberal and hospitable table; a supply of provisions.

    "Care not thou about that," said Joliffe; "but tell me, softly and hastily, what is in the pantry?" "Small housekeeping enough," said Phoebe; "a cold capon and some comfits, and the great standing venison pasty, with plenty of spice — a manchet or two besides, and that is all."

Etymology

From house + keeping.

Forms

plural
housekeepings
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).