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housing

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //ˈhaʊzɪŋ//
  • //ˈhaʊsɪŋ//

The activity of enclosing something or providing a residence for someone.

noun

  1. 1

    The activity of enclosing something or providing a residence for someone.

    Housing of homeless families is a priority.

  2. 2

    Residences, collectively.

    She lives in low-income housing.

  3. 3

    A mechanical component's container or covering.

    The gears were grinding against their housing.

  4. 4

    A cover or cloth for a horse's saddle, as an ornamental or military appendage; a saddlecloth; a horse cloth; in plural, trappings.

  5. 5

    An appendage to the harness or collar of a harness.

  6. 6

    The space taken out of one solid to admit the insertion of part of another, such as the end of one timber in the side of another.

  7. 7

    A niche for a statue.

  8. 8

    That portion of a mast or bowsprit which is beneath the deck or within the vessel.

  9. 9

    A houseline.

Etymology

From Middle English housynge, housinge, from housen (“to house, shelter; receive into one's house”), equivalent to house + -ing. Cognate with Scots housing (“housing”), Old Frisian hūsinge (whence Saterland Frisian Huzenge); compare also Dutch huizing, behuizing (“housing”), Low German husing, hüsing (“housing”), German Behausung (“housing”), Swedish inhysing (“housing”).

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of housepresent participle and gerund of house

    We are housing the company's servers in Florida.

Etymology

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

Forms

plural
housings
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).