House is where the heart is.
House is wherever you hang your hat. Come in, make yourself at house! There’s no place like house. House, sweet house1.
Sounds a little off, doesn’t it?
To me, there is no better illustration of the problems with classifying and teaching synonyms than the words house and home. For two words that seem to have such a clear distinction - home is an idea and house is a building, there sure is a lot of overlap in using them. Except, of course, when there’s not.
Each of the idioms above represents a definition of somewhere you feel comfortable, safe, and relaxed. And while a house is, hopefully, all three of those things, we as humans are fully able to make ourselves at home in other people’s houses.
And yet, there are any number of times when the words house and home could be fully interchangeable. We see this most often with compound nouns: beach house or beach home, safe house, safe home, halfway house, halfway home. While each case can be argued over regarding the specific semantic and lexical nuances, in actual context, if you replaced house with home or vice versa, you would not lose any meaning. In fact, a lot of what constitutes the “right” word is more a reflection of where you’re from and what flavor of English you speak than any semantic or lexical difference2.
So, our issue: house and home are synonymous except when they’re not. Which means that, if we were doing a close analysis of a given text house and home could be, depending on usage, absolute synonyms, propositional synonyms, or near synonyms3. Here are some examples written by Chat GPT4:
Absolute: After a long day at work, there’s nothing better than coming back to my house / home and relaxing.
You can replace either home or house with the other word without changing the meaning of the sentence. In this one specific instance, the two words express the same semantic idea.
Propositional: Although she grew up in a small apartment, she has managed to make her house/home feel warm and welcoming.
Here’s where we begin to encounter nuance. Either word works in this context, but home implies that protagonist has managed to create something with a distinct atmosphere, regardless of the actual type of building, while house carries the same connotation but with the added idea that as her physical frontiers have expanded, so have her emotional ones.
Nearly: I'm excited to show you around my new house, it may be empty now, but I'm looking forward to making it a home.
Finally, we’ve got both words used in a compound sentence to more-or-less equal each other but the nuances can be expanded upon through the contrasting conjunction. This dwelling does not yet have a cozy atmosphere but once it does it will be a home meaning that once it does, then house and home may become absolute synonyms once again.
Now, just to complicate matters, here’s an example where the two words are not synonymous at all:
After months of traveling, it felt good to return to the warmth and comfort of the home fires.
Hopefully we can all agree that home fires good, house fires bad.
All of which is a long of way of saying that while we can make generalizations about which words are synonyms of each other, we would be better off asking if a given pair of words can be synonyms in each specific case. But, for the language learner, simply differentiating between nuances in meaning can be difficult enough even before bringing questions of synonymy into the conversation.
What’s the solution? I’m not sure. My first thought was to find a word that could be used as a go-between, something that could equal both house and home in different contexts. I chose the word hearth. As a physical part of a fireplace, it can be used as a synonym for the entire building quite easily. At the same time, it contains those cozy home fires we all hope to return to, making it an ideal synonym for home.
By teaching this admittedly archaic word, my hope was that students could triangulate in on different contexts in which it might be okay to use house or home. As a pedagogical theory, I think it has some merit. In practice, it did nothing but confuse my students with a word they didn’t really need to know.
(And again, this is not a vocabulary issue per se; learners understand the words house and home easily, the issue we’re trying to resolve is creating an understanding of when the two words are synonymous and when they are not.)
So we’ve come to my current theory: we split the difference. Earlier in this essay, I said that home is an idea and a house is a building. Which is mostly true. But there are enough nuances inside those broad definitions that we can break each word down into a group of concepts. We can look for the most common usages that convey those concepts and we try to find words that approximate those meanings. In other words, we look at when and how we use home to mean “the social unit formed by a family” and then we find common synonyms that can generally be used instead5 or we look at house in the sense of “a place of business or entertainment” and find words that work equally well.
I’m honestly not sure it will work. But that’s the topic I plan to explore over the next couple of weeks. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
The Pitch
If you'd like to support my work and this newsletter, please consider becoming a subscriber. You'll get two extra newsletters a month discussing all the non-synonymy related stuff in my brain. If that's not in the cards at the moment, no biggie.
What We’re Reading
All links to books discussed here go to A Very Learned Bookstore on Bookshop.org, meaning I'll get a small commission on any books purchased through these links.
In the Land of Invented Languages
by Arika Okrent
ConLangs are one of my fascinations; it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of creating a new language from scratch. I don’t have enough time to learn all the natural languages I’d like to learn! Nevertheless, I’m fascinated by constructed languages and this book takes us on a journey of discovery through conlang after conlang, giving us the histories and stories of the people involved.
It’s been on my list for a long time and I’m finally getting around to reading it. I have to say I’m really enjoying it and looking forward to further exploring some of the languages mentioned within.
Arguably, House, sweet House doesn’t sound as “wrong” if you change it to a pronoun as it is in any number of fantasy novels wherein the building is a character. Then it’s just another compliment.
Of course, this gets thrown into further chaos when you begin listing all the compound nouns in which house and home are absolutely not synonymous, e.g. home plate and house plate.
Again using the definitions provided by the Blackwell Handbook of Linguistics.
I still have some reservations regarding the use of a.i. but, for me, for right now, this is the way to use them: this article is my idea and my writing, save for the three example sentences I used the a.i. to write. Obviously, I verified them and tested them against my definitions, but, mainly, it saved me a ton of time trying to think of good examples thereby allowing me to write the rest of the article. Any thoughts on this?
Many of which can be found inside the definition, e.g. family.
Really interesting and thought provoking ! Thank you!