houseless.
Lacking a house, or, by extension, a residence or place of refuge in general; thus, having no home.
Meaning & usage
Lacking a house, or, by extension, a residence or place of refuge in general; thus, having no home.
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.
Lacking a permanent place of residence but not a ‘home’ in the broader sense, for example in the form of a community.
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.
Containing no house or place of refuge; wild or inhospitable.
Where this word comes from
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”).
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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.