A house is a home, building or structure the primary function of which is to be occupied for habitation by humans or other creatures. The term house includes many kinds of dwellings ranging from rudimentary huts of nomadic tribes to complex structures composed of many systems. English-speaking people generally call any building they routinely occupy "home".
The social unit that lives in a house is known as a household. Most commonly, a household is a family unit of some kind, though households may be other social groups, organizations or individuals.
Read more about House: Etymology, Construction, Found Materials, Identifying Houses, Animal Houses, Houses and Symbolism
Famous quotes containing the word house:
“We want some coat woven of elastic steel, stout as the first, and limber as the second. We want a ship in these billows we inhabit. An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and splinters, in this storm of many elements. No, it must be tight, and fit to the form of man, to live at all; as a shell is the architecture of a house founded on the sea.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If you feed a man, and wash his clothes, and borne his children, you and that man are married, that man is yours. If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stoves, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.”
—Truman Capote (20th century)
“Long time he lay upon the sunny hill,
To his father’s house below securely bound.”
—Edwin Muir (1887–1959)