homestead

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

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

   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:

2. 2
   noun

   The place that is one's home.

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

3. 3
   noun

   The home or seat of a family; place of origin.

   Where then wast thou tempted, O Blessed Jesu? or whither wentest thou to meet with our great Adversary? I do not see thee led into the marketplace, or any other part of the City, or thy home-stead of Nazareth, but into the vast Wilderness, the habitation of beasts;

4. 4
   verb

   To acquire or settle on land as a homestead.

   When Samuel and Liza came to the Salinas Valley all the level land was taken, the rich bottoms, the little fertile creases in the hills, the forests, but there was still marginal land to be homesteaded, and in the barren hills, to the east of what is now King City, Samuel Hamilton homesteaded.

5. 5
   noun

   dwelling that is usually a farmhouse and adjoining land

6. 6
   noun

   land acquired from the United States public lands by filing a record and living on and cultivating it under the homestead law

7. 7
   noun

   the home and adjacent grounds occupied by a family

8. 8
   verb

   settle land given by the government and occupy it as a homestead

Etymology

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.