Word.ws English Dictionary

kept house

kept house is the simple past and past participle of keep house.

Meaning of keep house

Verb

keep house (third-person singular simple present keeps house, present participle keeping house, simple past and past participle kept house)

  1. (idiomatic) To take care of domestic chores; work as a housekeeper.
    • So I went to keep house with him at the Why Not? and my aunt sent down my bag of clothes, and would have made over to Elzevir the pittance that my father left for my keep, but he said it was not needful, and he would have none of it.[1898], J[ohn] Meade Falkner, Moonfleet, London; Toronto, Ont.: Jonathan Cape, published 1934, →OCLC
  2. To seclude oneself in one's house in order to evade the demands of creditors.
    Synonyms:
    knead

Questions about kept house

What is kept house the simple past and past participle of?
Kept house is the simple past and past participle of keep house.

Words near kept house in the dictionary

  1. kept down
  2. kept faith
  3. kept from
  4. kept going
  5. kept good time
  6. kept house
  7. kept in
  8. kept in mind
  9. kept in with
  10. kept it 100
  11. kept it a bean

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: kept house (page history and authors); keep house (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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