Word.ws English Dictionary

close to home

close to home adverb: affecting people close to, or within, one's family circle.

Adverb

close to home (comparative closer to home, superlative closest to home)

  1. (idiomatic) Affecting people close to, or within, one's family circle.
  2. (figuratively) Affecting one personally through deep familiarity.
    • to hit close to home
    • […] when you laugh about people who feel so very lonely / […] I wish I could laugh / but that joke isn't funny anymore / it's too close to home / and it's too near the bone1985, Johnny Marr, Morrissey, “That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore”, in Meat is Murder, performed by The Smiths

Forms of close to home

comparativecloser to home
superlativeclosest to home

Questions about close to home

What does close to home mean?
Close to home means affecting people close to, or within, one's family circle.
What part of speech is close to home?
Close to home is an adverb.

Words near close to home in the dictionary

  1. close thing
  2. close things
  3. close time
  4. close times
  5. close to
  6. close to home
  7. close to one's vest
  8. close to someone's heart
  9. close to the bone
  10. close to the metal
  11. close to the vest

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: close to home (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-close to home.ogg.

Cite this entry: “close to home.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/close_to_home. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.