the meaning of word homework

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Etymology of "housework" and "homework"

In American English (perhaps British as well), "housework" and "homework" have different meanings. "Housework" refers to working around the house, such as dusting, vacuuming, etc., whereas "homework" refers to doing some school assignments at home, after school is out.

Homework can be completed outside the home, such as in a library. In order to do housework, however, one must be at one's house. How and when did two words which seem so similar at first glance gain such different meanings?

• 2 It might be interesting for you to know that I didn't find any entry in the OED regarding "housework". It is weird since I know the word exists. –  Alenanno Commented Apr 3, 2011 at 17:35
• 2 Maybe the Brits don't do houseworks! But how they've managed to keep their mansions & chesterfields so pristine is beyond me. Mm. –  Percy P. Commented Apr 3, 2011 at 17:41
• 2 We Brits invented 'housework'! Along with a rigid class system to make sure it was only done by scullery maids & other lesser mortals, leaving the lady of the house to concentrate of receiving 'gentleman callers'. But I never heard of anyone so grand they needed to pluralise the efforts others make on their behalf. –  FumbleFingers Commented Apr 3, 2011 at 17:48
• 2 And originally in English public schools (which are private) homework wouldn't be done at home (since they were boarders) but in your house - but wasn't called homework it was called prep. Great language! - for an encore we will explain cricket –  mgb Commented Apr 3, 2011 at 18:09
• Once I finish this post, I will go back to "working from home", which interestingly refers to a paid job, and is neither housework nor homework. –  Jay Commented May 1, 2012 at 18:01

2 Answers 2

According to the OED , the original meaning of "homework" does conflate much more obviously with "housework," with the former being defined, above all, as:

Work done at home , esp. as distinguished from work done in a shop or factory.

The earliest citation is a hearty piece of precious advice from a sermon from the 1680s:

Wherefore let every Man, in the first place, look after his Homework ; what he hath to do at Home.

Less vague examples of homework were given in later quotes: Spinning, quilting, and embroidery. This crafty and practical usage seems, however, to be an obsolescent meaning of homework , with the last use from the '30s. But the word "home worker" (doing low-paying piecework) lives on, preserving this original meaning of "homework":

Most home workers are women. They need the flexibility of working hours that home work allows. ( Guardian , 1973)

The second—and now primary—meaning of "review/preparatory school work despised by youth" didn't appear until much later (late 19th century), but it's thriving and strong, having quickly overtaken the original meaning.

▶ Housework

The first citation of "house-work" from the OED (which hyphenates it) is from mid-19th century. Its meaning has always been as it is now: "the work done to keep a house orderly (and housewares clean)," diligently by housewives and begrudgingly by house-servants:

While the boys are engaged in out-door work, the girls could be employed in sewing or house-work . ( Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs , 1871)

Here it contrasts homework (sewing) with housework [other activities].

As FumbleFingers's Ngram shows, it has also been used in texts in its unhyphenated form, which the OED has chosen not to include, as Alenanno first noted above in the comments, although it does feature a sub-entry for the spaced "house work" (definition-less, with a single late-19th-century quote).

So the two words would seem to have diverged after the first ( homework ) took on a specialized meaning relatively late in its life. Now let's find the courage to get back to doing either/both!

• So you did found it in the OED? –  Alenanno Commented Apr 3, 2011 at 22:56
• Aye, but not as "housework," but as "house-work" and "house work." The Brits prefer 'em hyphens & spaces, it seems. –  Percy P. Commented Apr 3, 2011 at 23:38
• 1 I did find it as "housework" at dictionary.reference.com/browse/housework . I do believe American English tends to lose the hyphens in words more quickly than British English, but I am no linguis. That is just speculation. –  ssakl Commented Apr 4, 2011 at 15:21

I think it's pretty clear housework came first, as shown by this . Apart from anything else, the activity now called homework probably didn't actually occur very often in a world where many children either didn't go to school at all, or had limited access to books, writing materials, etc. at home.

But it's worth mentioning that some (non-working) women who don't really like to call themselves (or be called) a 'housewife' will accept 'home-maker'. There are various subtle differences between house and home , but they're pretty much the same thing in most contexts, notwithstanding the 1964 song A House Is Not a Home .

• 1 This 'subtle difference' in particular is one that I have always found very interesting. It makes the English language appear quite sweet (Home suggests 'family' - a 'lived-in' house). Many other languages don't have this same distinction, though they interestingly are both of Germanic origin. –  Karl Commented Apr 3, 2011 at 18:58

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RFK Jr. Tries To Redefine The Meaning Of MAGA After Endorsing Trump

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Now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is backing Donald Trump , he wants people to rethink the Republican’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

The long-shot presidential candidate turned to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, on Sunday morning to share a lengthy reinterpretation of the right-wing’s motto , which has long been read as Trump’s shorthand to turn back the clock on rights to reproductive freedom, the social welfare system, immigration access, and more.

In a post that proclaimed to detail “what ‘MAGA’ really means,” RFK wrote, “The phrase has troubled liberals who think it is a call for a return to an America before civil rights, gay rights, and women’s rights,” before offering a “more generous interpretation” of the phrase.

Claiming his definition of MAGA was “one that is truer to my experience of Donald Trump as he is today,” the Kennedy family scion said. “‘Make America Great Again’ recalls a nation brimming with vitality, with a can-do spirit, with hope and a belief in itself.”

“It was an America that was beginning to confront its darker shadows, could acknowledge the injustice in its past and present, yet at the same time could celebrate its successes,” he went on.

“It was a nation of broad prosperity, the world’s most vibrant middle class, and a idealistic belief (though not consistently applied) in freedom, justice, and democracy,” Kennedy continued. “It was a nation that led the world in innovation, productivity, and technology. And it was the healthiest country in the world.”

“I have talked to many Trump supporters. I have talked with his inner circle. I have talked to the man himself,” he concluded. “This is the America they want to restore.”

Though RFK offered his own take on the MAGA movement on Sunday, former president Trump’s official platform, known as “Agenda 47,” offers a blueprint for enacting sweeping reforms on American progress.

The platform promises to weed out “wokeness” from the American education system, push back rights for the LGBTQ+ community, and close the border to refugees and asylum seekers, among other things.

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Alix earle apologizes for using n-word in resurfaced posts: i ‘did not understand the deeply offensive meaning’.

TikTok star Alix Earle issued an apology after using the N-word in a resurfaced posts from when she was 13 years old.

“A couple of weeks ago, screenshots surfaced from my old ask.fm account showing me using a slur in the summer of 2014,” the 23-year-old influencer wrote in a statement shared on her Instagram Story Monday.

“I am taking accountability and want to make it clear that I was 13 years old and did not understand the deeply offensive meaning behind that word. That is no excuse for using that word in any context or at any age. That is absolutely not the way I speak or what I stand for.”

Earlier this month, screenshots of Earle’s past comments resurfaced online after being posted in a Reddit thread two years ago.

The posts showed her using the racial slur under the username “Alixxxxxx” while responding to others on the platform, which allowed users to ask questions either publicly or anonymously.

The social media personality came under fire for not addressing her remarks sooner, which she acknowledged in Monday’s statement.

“I regret how I handled the situation,” Earle wrote, claiming she was advised against speaking out, which she realized was “wrong.”

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“There is no one to blame but myself for not standing my ground and going with my gut to speak out right away,” she continued.

“In the absence of my addressing this, my silence allowed others to fill the void with rumors that simply aren’t true,” Earle added, referring to allegations made by “Do We Know Them?” podcast hosts Jessie Smiles and Lily Marston , who claimed she trademarked the offensive posts to prevent them from being shared.

Earle called the accusations “absolutely ridiculous” and “untrue.”

She also shut down rumors that brands have cut ties with her over the controversy.

“Regardless of what’s being said online, I wanted to come on here to address the facts and most importantly apologize,” Earle concluded.

The influencer rose to fame in 2020, per the Cut , when she started posting “Get ready with me” videos on TikTok as a student at the University of Miami.

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Viral video claims the older generation has ‘gramnesia’ when it comes to parenting young kids

When Allie McQuaid, a licensed therapist , heard a client mention the term “gramnesia,” she knew exactly what they meant, even though she had never heard the word before.

Based on the conversation with her client, plus some extracurricular Reddit research, McQuaid defines “gramnesia” as “the grandparent forgetting what it’s like to have young children. Basically, they have amnesia of those early days of parenting.”

McQuaid, a Maryland mom of a 4-year-old, tells TODAY.com that her client found the term in an online forum for moms who had babies around the same time. The client, who felt like her own mother was minimizing her parenting experience at the time, felt drawn to the term because she saw it play out in her life.

“It’s experience that I think a lot of new parents go through when their own parents are somewhat involved in caring for the grandchildren, and they forget what it’s like having those early postpartum days,” says McQuaid.

As a therapist who creates content specifically for “millennial moms,” McQuaid created an Instagram video about the term for her @millennialmomtherapist account.

McQuaid sips a drink from a “good vibes only” mug as this text appears over the screen: “I just heard this term called ‘gramnesia’ when grandparents forget what it’s like having young kids and I can’t stop thinking about how accurate it is.”

In the caption, McQuaid wrote, “I hear so many stories from my clients about how when they bring their kids around their own parents (so the grandparents) then they get slammed with comments like, ‘Oh you never had tantrums when you were a kid,’ or, “I potty trained you before you were 1.’”

Rather than blaming the older generation for this potential failure of empathy, McQuaid added, “It’s also very possible that older generations of moms were not given space to express emotions or indicate that they were struggling to adjust to motherhood.”

McQuaid's post certainly struck a chord. It has 4.4 million views since it went live on June 6.

“I did not expect it to go as viral as I guess it did,” says McQuaid.

Her follow-up post has more than 2 million views. This time the text reads: “When your boomer parents claim that you never cried or had tantrums or slept through the night when you were 6 weeks old.”

From the millions of views and thousands of comments, McQuaid realized that there were a ton of moms who felt that their experience wasn't being validated by their parents.

Readers wrote:

• "5 months old and not sleeping through the night? Did you try rice cereal? Baby not walking? Rice cereal. Baby not in college yet? Have you tried rice cereal?"
• "My dad wants to know why my active 2 year old just can’t “sit down and read a book” like I apparently did at that age."
• "My mom insists that nothing about pregnancy was hard or uncomfortable ever and that my sister was always an angel and absolutely didn’t cry all the time. My memory is quite different. For both of those. LOL."

McQuaid explains that often grandparents are not “reflecting on their own time as a parent and really being there for the new postpartum parents, specifically the moms,” she says. “There was a lot of excitement and validation and just feeling heard and understood in the comments.”

But new moms weren't the only people responding to McQuaid's post. "There were a lot of comments from boomers as well, almost defending themselves," she says.

But new moms weren’t the only people responding to McQuaid’s post. “There were a lot of comments from boomers as well, almost defending themselves,” she says.

• "Seriously? We have amnesia if you don't think it was true? Or maybe our kids didn't have tantrums, maybe ask why or how and learn something! Not everything has to be a competition."
• "Oh, we don’t forget one bit. We just enjoy watching from the other side."

McQuaid acknowledges that gramnesia is “a jokey term,” but it’s also “so accurate that I’ve even found myself only four years into motherhood being somewhat, you know, forgetful of those early days.” She suggests that you might even unconsciously want to forget the newborn phase because “you’re exhausted, you’re sleep deprived, you maybe are experiencing trauma. There’s a lot that’s going on that you kind of want to block it out and not remember it.”

So what do new parents want to hear from their parents? McQuaid has a post on that, too.

Here's what she wrote that grandparents should convey to their kids: “We must have forgotten what it was like. You are doing a great job, and it gets so much better that you might forget how hard it was.”

According to McQuaid, millennial moms are already consumed with too much information and worried about doing things the “right” way for their children. So whether grandparents have gramnesia or not, the most helpful thing they can do is to say, “I’m here for you.”

Rosie Colosi lives in New Jersey and is a reporter for TODAY Parents. She has bylines in The Atlantic, The Week, MSNBC, and PureWow, and she has written 33 nonfiction children's books for Scholastic, Klutz, and Nat Geo Kids. Once upon a time, she played Mrs. Claus in "The Rockettes' Radio City Christmas Spectacular," but now she mostly sings songs from "Annie" to her two daughters … while they beg her to play Kidz Bop.

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Definition of homework – Learner’s Dictionary

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• Go upstairs and do your homework.
• For your homework, please do exercise 3 on page 24.
• When I finish my homework, can I watch TV?
• Get on with your homework.
• She was trying to duck out of doing her homework.

(Definition of homework from the Cambridge Learner's Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

Translations of homework

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a very short holiday

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The Bitter Fight Over the Meaning of ‘Genocide’

Debates over how to describe conflicts in Gaza, Myanmar and elsewhere are channeling a controversy as old as the word itself.

Credit... Illustration by Pablo Delcan

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Linda Kinstler is a junior fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows and the author of “Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends.” She has written extensively about legal history and the politics of memory.

• Aug. 20, 2024

On Feb. 26, 2007, Smail Čekić stormed out of the Peace Palace, the seat of the International Court of Justice, carrying the decision the judges had just handed down. The case that concluded that day, Bosnia v. Serbia, was to determine whether Serbia had violated the Genocide Convention during the Bosnian War, when Bosnian Serb forces killed an estimated 100,000 civilians. Čekić, then the director of Sarajevo University’s Institute for Research of Crimes Against Humanity and International Law and a Bosnian victim of the war, had hoped the court, which is based in The Hague, would punish his compatriots’ deaths and acknowledge them as victims of genocide. Instead, the court declined to classify a vast majority of the Bosnian deaths as genocidal. For Čekić and other survivors, the ruling was a betrayal: They felt that the court had refused to recognize the true nature of the violence. Newspapers reported that Serbia had been found not guilty of genocide; a celebration was planned at the Serbian Embassy. Standing outside the I.C.J., the top court of the United Nations, Čekić tore the text of the judgment to pieces.

Listen to this article, read by Soneela Nankani

That day, the court ruled that over the course of the war, Serbia committed genocide only in one instance. During the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Bosnian Serb fighters took roughly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys to predetermined sites before killing them and throwing their bodies into mass graves. In a vast landscape of murder that, as the judges acknowledged, included horrors like the systematic torture, rape and beatings of Bosnians in detention camps and the expulsion of thousands of non-Serbs, this episode alone appeared sufficiently genocidal to the judges. Only there did the perpetrators explicitly display the dolus specialis , or specific intent, “to destroy, in whole or in part, the group as such” required for a killing to be considered an instance of genocide. Killings elsewhere in Bosnia may have been war crimes or crimes against humanity — acts that were equally grave — but the decision argued that wherever there were any other plausible reasons for why the killings took place, the court could not rule that genocide definitively occurred. In a dissenting opinion, Judge Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh of Jordan chastised his colleagues for failing to appreciate the “definitional complexity” of genocide by interpreting the intent requirement so narrowly.

Marko Milanović, now a scholar of international law, was working as a clerk at the I.C.J. that day in 2007. He watched on TV as Čekić tore up the verdict in anger. For him, the episode heralded a rupture that by then was already underway. The moral force of the word “genocide” and the public understanding of the word had become fully detached from its relatively narrow legal meaning. Ever since the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the word in 1944, by combining the Greek word genos , meaning “race or tribe,” with the Latin cide, or “killing,” it has been pulled taut between languages — Greek and Latin, legal and moral.

In his book from that year, “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,” Lemkin explains that he saw the word as describing “an old practice in its modern development.” In his view, genocide encompassed a broad array of crimes committed with the intent to destroy a national, religious, racial or ethnic group. A secular Jew who believed that every people carried its own distinct spirit, Lemkin argued that genocide included acts not just of physical obliteration but also of cultural annihilation. For him, the word described any attempt to stamp out a people’s essence from the earth. It included mass killings as well as actions to eliminate the “essential foundations of the life of national groups”: the destruction of language, traditions, monuments, artworks, archives, libraries, universities and places of worship. Lemkin’s hope was that coining the word, and persuading nations to recognize it as a crime, might somehow prevent it from recurring. He wanted his neologism to convert what Winston Churchill once called a “crime without a name” into an identifiable, obvious and abhorrent thing.

But by the time the United Nations approved the Genocide Convention on Dec. 9, 1948, making genocide a crime under international law, only a shadow of Lemkin’s original idea survived. After years of contentious deliberation and diplomatic negotiation, the convention limited genocide to five categories of acts: killing members of a group; causing group members serious bodily or mental harm; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children from one group to another; and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Each one of these acts could constitute genocide only if and when committed with the specific intent to destroy a protected group. All state parties agreed to prevent and punish any instance of this crime.

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Michigan can't escape sign-stealing drama with Connor Stalions featured in Netflix episode

It’s game week again in Ann Arbor. This should be a time of excitement when the reigning national champions pivot toward a promising future by officially turning the page on a landmark season that established a new standard of Michigan football .

The Wolverines have a new coach, a different cast of players and a tantalizing menu of games that begins with a nice amuse-bouche, Fresno State, this Saturday in the opener .

In the words of senior right guard Giovanni El-Hadi, it has been “a complete reset.”

“Everything that happened last year,” he said Monday, “doesn’t define us.”

Yet it still trails them, shaping the narrative around these Wolverines as they look to turn the page and start writing a new chapter. The fallout from the most incendiary flashpoints during their title-winning march continues to linger, making it difficult for Michigan to move forward without first reconciling with its controversial past.

A documentary on Connor Stalions, the former Michigan staffer who is alleged to have been at the center of the sign-stealing scandal that became the talk of the sport last fall, debuted Tuesday morning as part of Netflix’s “Untold” series .

Stalions, described as “viral villain” in a promotional campaign, is set to give his side of a salacious story that just won’t die.

Just this past Sunday, the NCAA revived interest in this sordid saga when it delivered Michigan a formal notice of allegations related to its investigation into the scheme .

In the draft version obtained by ESPN earlier this month, the school was reportedly hit with a major Level I charge for a “pattern of noncompliance within the football program.” Meanwhile, Sherrone Moore, who replaced Jim Harbaugh as head coach in January, is one of seven members from the 2023 staff accused of violating NCAA rules. Moore faces a Level II sanction after he allegedly deleted a chain of 52 text messages with Stalions when news broke last October that he was the purported mastermind of an advanced scouting plot to capture future opponents’ play signals.

The correspondence was eventually recovered and provided to the enforcement staff, but Moore could be punished as a potential repeat violator after serving a one-game suspension in September 2023 as part of a negotiated resolution related to a previous NCAA probe into impermissible recruiting activities.

During his encounters with the media, Moore has acted as if he is unbothered by all the drama that has haunted him and his program throughout this summer .

With a constant drumbeat of chatter about the Stalions doc and NCAA case thumping all around him, Moore insisted he has walled himself off from the outside noise.

“You can write about that all you want,” Moore said Monday, “but we’re just worried about playing.”

Moore’s dismissive reaction is unsurprising.

By now, he has become inured to the turbulent wake that has enveloped the Wolverines and sloshed up against the sides of Schembechler Hall. In fact, the signature moment of his career was forged last November in the crucible of controversy, when the sign-stealing mess came to a head and he led the Wolverines to a victory over Penn State the day after Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti issued Harbaugh a three-game ban .

Moore then bawled on national television during a profanity-laced postgame interview that captured the emotional intensity of that frenetic period.

The temperature has since cooled while Moore has become more settled, projecting confidence as the face of Michigan football.

“Kind of stopped getting nervous,” he said.

But he has a big task ahead of him as he tries to steer Michigan through more troubled waters.

With the Wolverines coming off a national title, the tidal wave of expectations has yet to subside. It doesn’t matter that Michigan lost 10 starters on offense, has yet to pick the quarterback to succeed NFL first-round pick J.J. McCarthy or confronts a daunting schedule in the first year of a heftier Big Ten that has 18 teams.

There will be little patience if Moore and the Wolverines stumble early, which is why they can’t afford to have many more distractions.

As El-Hadi said, everyone is after them.

“We have always had a target on our back,” he observed. “But now it’s even bigger than ever. ... We’re everybody’s Super Bowl. We’ve got to treat it that way.”

It was a subtle acknowledgement that a “complete reset,” the one El-Hadi longs for, is impossible. For better and worse, the events of last fall will continue to dictate the conversation about a team that has a rather strange duality: Michigan is both the reigning national champion and the most controversial program in the sport.

Everything that transpired the over the past 10 months has shadowed these Wolverines, framing the perception of them in the eyes of their beholders. The NCAA and Netflix reminded Michigan of that this week.

As much as the Wolverines are ready to take their tale in a new direction, they were confronted with the realization that the epilogue to their 2023 season has only begun to be written. The sign-stealing serial has become their never-ending story, and they are no longer in control of the narrative.