homesteads

Noun

homestead (plural homesteads)

1. 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: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
   1. (Canada, US) A 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.
      • 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...1913, Willa Cather, chapter 2, in O Pioneers!, Part 1
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
3. (South Africa) A cluster of several houses occupied by an extended family.
4. (obsolete) 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;c. 1620s, Joseph Hall, The Contemplations upon the History of the New Testament, London, published 1661, page 30

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