Word.ws English Dictionary

plays house

plays house is the third-person singular simple present indicative of play house.

Meaning of play house

Verb

play house (third-person singular simple present plays house, present participle playing house, simple past and past participle played house)

  1. (children's games) To pretend to be a family in the household, acting out housekeeping and different family roles.
    • They can keep all their things there and play house in their own way.
  2. To live as if married without actually being legally married, cohabit
    • Though she flaunted her affair with TJ, Grace never admitted in print that she and George had “played house” before their marriage. Instead, she claimed they were married in 19421981, Emily Toth, Inside Peyton Place: the life of Grace Metalious, page 209

See all 5 meanings of play house

Questions about plays house

What is plays house the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Plays house is the third-person singular simple present indicative of play house.

Words near plays house in the dictionary

  1. plays havoc
  2. plays hell with
  3. plays hob with
  4. plays hooky
  5. plays host to
  6. plays house
  7. plays in
  8. plays in Peoria
  9. plays into someone's hand
  10. plays into someone's hands
  11. plays into the hand of

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: plays house (page history and authors); play 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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Cite this entry: “plays house.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/plays_house. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.