homestead

What it means

1. A house together with surrounding land and buildings, especially on a farm; the property comprising these.

   The preacher lived on his homestead two miles away and it seemed to Laura the longest drive she had ever taken, and yet it was over all too soon.

   1971, Laura Ingalls Wilder, The First Four Years, page 10

   3 more examples

   A Yard she had with Pales enclos’d about, / Some high, some low, and a dry Ditch without. / Within this Homestead, liv’d without a Peer, / For crowing loud, the noble Chanticleer:

   1700, John Dryden, “The Cock and the Fox: or, The Tale of the Nun’s Priest, from Chaucer”, in Fables, Ancient and Modern, London: Jacob Tonson, page 225

   […] no sooner has a hen disburdened herself, than she rushes forth with a clamorous kind of joy, which the cock and the rest of his mistresses immediately adopt. The tumult is not confined to the family concerned, but catches from yard to yard, and spreads to every homestead within hearing, till at last the whole village is in an uproar.

   1778, Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, London: B. White & Son, published 1789, Letter 43 to Daines Barrington, page 242

   It was an important-looking village, with a fine old church and large churchyard in the heart of it, and two or three large brick-and-stone homesteads, with well-walled orchards and ornamental weathercocks, standing close upon the road […]

   1861, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter I, in Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC

   1. CanadaUSA parcel of land in the interior of North America, usually 160 acres, that was distributed to settlers from Europe or eastern North America under the Dominion Lands Act of 1870 in Canada or the Homestead Act of 1862 in the United States.

      1 more example

      He owned exactly six hundred and forty acres of what stretched outside his door; his own original homestead and timber claim, making three hundred and twenty acres, and the half-section adjoining, the homestead of a younger brother who had given up the fight, gone back to Chicago to work in a fancy bakery […]

      1913, Willa Cather, chapter 2, in O Pioneers!, Part 1

      Synonyms: farmstead, quarter section

2. The place that is one's home.

   Grief from yeer to yeer / Rents my poor Heart, and makes his Home-stead there:

   1649, Thomas Bancroft, “To the never-dying Memory of the Noble Lord Hastings”, in Richard Brome, editor, Lachrymæ Musarum, London, page 54

In a sentence

A Yard she had with Pales enclos’d about, / Some high, some low, and a dry Ditch without. / Within this Homestead, liv’d without a Peer, / For crowing loud, the noble Chanticleer:

1700, John Dryden, “The Cock and the Fox: or, The Tale of the Nun’s Priest, from Chaucer”, in Fables, Ancient and Modern, London: Jacob Tonson, page 225

Where it comes from

1. Proto-West Germanic*haimastadi“homestead”
2. Old Englishhāmstede“homestead”
3. Middle Englishhamstede
4. Englishhomestead

From Middle English hamstede, hemstede (attested in placenames), from Old English hāmstede (“homestead”), from Proto-West Germanic *haimastadi (“homestead”). By surface analysis, home + stead. Cognate with Old Frisian hāmstede, hēmstede (“homestead”), Dutch heemstede (“homestead”), German Heimstatt, Heimstätte (“homestead”), Swedish hemstad (“homestead”), Old Icelandic heimstǫð (“homestead”). Doublet of Hampstead and Hempstead.

First known use: 1872