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hearth.

The place in a home where a fire is or was traditionally kept for home heating and for cooking, usually constituted by at least a hearthstone and often enclosed to varying degrees by any combination of reredos, fireplace, oven, smoke hood, or chimney.

6 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈhɑːθ/Received-Pronunciation[ˈhɑːθ]Received-Pronunciation/ˈhɑɹθ/General-American[ˈhɑɹθ]General-American
  1. The place in a home where a fire is or was traditionally kept for home heating and for cooking, usually constituted by at least a hearthstone and often enclosed to varying degrees by any combination of reredos, fireplace, oven, smoke hood, or chimney.

  2. A hearthstone, either as standalone or as the floor of an enclosed fireplace or oven.

    cooking on an open hearth
  3. A fireplace: an open recess in a wall at the base of a chimney where a fire may be built.

  4. The lowest part of a metallurgical furnace.

  5. A brazier, chafing dish, or firebox.

  6. Home or family life.

    figuratively
  7. A household or group in some forms of the modern pagan faith Heathenry.

    Germanic
Where this word comes from

From Middle English herth, herthe, from Old English heorþ, from Proto-West Germanic *herþ, from Proto-Germanic *herþaz, possibly from Proto-Indo-European *kerh₃- (“heat; fire”). Cognate with West Frisian hurd, Dutch haard, German Herd, Swedish härd. First attested in the Old English period. The modern spelling is from an Middle English/Early Modern English /hɛːrθ/, from earlier /heːrθ/, levelled from inflected forms with /rð/ where the vowel would have been lengthened. The reflex of this pronunciation was preserved in obsolete dialectal /ˈhɜɹθ/.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.