houseless

English

Etymology

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”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈhaʊsləs/

Adjective

houseless (comparative more houseless, superlative most houseless)

1. (of a person) Lacking a house, or, by extension, a residence or place of refuge in general; thus, having no home.

   Synonyms: homeless, roofless

   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.

   • 1920 June 26, Harvey's Weekly‎^[1], volume 3, number 26, page 14:

     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 housing-shortage conditions of New York reflect, proportionately, the conditions prevalent in almost every large city in the country. We seem to be threatened with widespread houselessness and homelessness, for the pitiable makeshifts to which so many are driven by house shortage, and the consequent exorbitant rents, are appalling travesties of what American homes should be. Just what Mr. Walter Stabler, Comptroller of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, meant when he said that "unless radical action is taken something drastic will happen," is not quite clear. "Something drastic" is a pretty vague term. Mr. Stabler could hardly mean riotous invasions of the premises of the "ins" by infuriated mobs of the "outs." Houselessness is undoubtedly a breeder of lawlessness, but it is not open to direct-action remedies of the bread riot variety which sheer hunger not infrequently precipitates. If people have not a place to lay their heads at night, not because they are penniless but because there are no roofs to shelter them, about the only thing they can do is to camp in parks and suburban fields. It has even come to that in Newark, and it may come to that elsewhere unless there is relief of some sort.

2. (of a person) Lacking a permanent place of residence but not a ‘home’ in the broader sense, for example in the form of a community.

   Synonym: roofless

   Coordinate term: homeless

   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.

   • 2023 May 14, Voices of Truth, A Part Of the Free Hawai`i Broadcasting Network, 7:15 from the start, in The Value Of Our Elders - A Visit With Lena Suzuki‎^[2], via YouTube, archived from the original on 19 May 2023‎^[3]:

     What I’m realizing is that a lot of our fishermens that are here that are, you know, houseless or whatever it is, they don’t realize that they are living in the footsteps of their kupuna. Because the Western society had made them look like: you’re houseless, you're this, you’re that, but actually they’re living the culture more than the next person. […] Our houseless people—if the end of the world comes, I’m going to go with our houseless people.

3. (of a place) Containing no house or place of refuge; wild or inhospitable.
   • 1922 [1918], Charles Josiah Galpin, “Chapter IV: Structure of rural society”, in Rural Life‎^[4], New York: Century Company, page 67:

     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 ranging from fifty to a thousand persons. Radiating from and circling around each village were the plowlands, pastures, meadows, and woodlands, spreading open; for the most part houseless, barnless, shedless, mill-less, even fenceless, clear to the similar lands, commons, and open fields belonging to the inhabitants of each adjoining village. The landscape picture presented, then, is a village cluster, surrounded at the extremities of irregular radii by a ring of similar clusters, all varying in size but separated from one another by open, unfenced, agricultural land. But the memory of each villager sticks to his own parcels of land, whether held individually or in common, so definitely, that, even without ditch, wall, or survey stakes, a clean-cut, psychological boundary, very irregular in shape it may be surmised, divides the lands of one village from the lands of every adjoining village, and sets apart a certain group of villagers as a distinctive agricultural community.

   • 1922, E[ric] R[ücker] Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros‎^[5], London: Jonathan Cape, page 23:

     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.

Derived terms

• houselessness

Translations

lacking a house or residence

• Greek:

  Ancient: ἄνοικος (ánoikos)

• Norwegian:

  Bokmål: husløs (no)

  Nynorsk: huslaus (no)