Word.ws English Dictionary

houseless

/ˈhaʊsləs/

houseless adjective: lacking a house, or, by extension, a residence or place of refuge in general; thus, having no home.

Adjective

houseless (comparative more houseless, superlative most houseless)

  1. Lacking a house, or, by extension, a residence or place of refuge in general; thus, having no home.
    • Some advocates for unhoused people have insisted that they be called houseless rather than homeless, but even within the community of advocates there is not universal agreement on this terminological prescription.
    • Houseless and Homeless. The estimate of the New York Housing Conference Secretary, Mr. Edward P. Doyle, that it will take half a billion dollars to overcome the present housing shortage, is probably not an exaggerated presentation of the plight New York is in in this respect. Furthermore, the...1920 June 26, Harvey's Weekly, volume 3, number 26, page 14
    Synonyms:
    homeless, roofless
  2. Lacking a permanent place of residence but not a ‘home’ in the broader sense, for example in the form of a community.
    • He said that he was houseless but not homeless because he went to school in that community, was registered to vote there, and had been living in the teepee for seventeen years. He said that teepee was his home.
    • No, I'm not… homeless. I'm just…houseless. Not the same thing, right?2020, Chloé Zhao, Nomadland, spoken by Fern (Frances McDormand)
    Synonyms:
    roofless
  3. Containing no house or place of refuge; wild or inhospitable.
    • MEDIEVAL RURAL LIFE AND ORGANIZATION. The manorial village. Let us refresh our memory at first with a glance at country life in England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. All rural life in England at this time was village life. Farmhouses were gathered into clusters sheltering a population...1922 [1918], Charles Josiah Galpin, “Chapter IV: Structure of rural society”, in Rural Life, New York: Century Company, page 67
    • And methought the dream smote up the roof above my bed, and the roof yawned to the naked air of the midnight, that laboured with fiery signs, and a bearded star travelling in the houseless dark.1922, E[ric] R[ücker] Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros: A Romance, London: Jonathan Cape […], →OCLC, page 23

Synonyms of houseless

Forms of houseless

comparativemore houseless
superlativemost houseless

Origin of houseless

From Middle English housles, from Old English *hūslēas, from Proto-West Germanic *hūslaus, from Proto-Germanic *hūsalausaz, equivalent to house + -less. Cognate with West Frisian húsleas (“houseless”), Dutch huisloos (“houseless”), German hauslos (“houseless”), Danish husløs (“houseless”), Swedish huslös (“houseless”), Icelandic húslaus (“houseless”).

Words formed from houseless

Questions about houseless

What does houseless mean?
Houseless means lacking a house, or, by extension, a residence or place of refuge in general; thus, having no home.
What part of speech is houseless?
Houseless is an adjective.
How do you pronounce houseless?
Houseless is pronounced /ˈhaʊsləs/.

Words near houseless in the dictionary

  1. houseleader
  2. houseleaders
  3. houseled
  4. houseleek
  5. houseleeks
  6. houseless
  7. houselessness
  8. houselet
  9. houselets
  10. houselight
  11. houselights

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: houseless (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Neøn-houseless.wav.

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