Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Because of the holidays, you're getting this on Monday instead of Tuesday. We're going to do the same thing next week, and then we'll go back to the regular schedule.

Today, we'll talk about the word home, and it's meaning beyond just a structure.

And then we'll talk about false friends, words in different languages that don't mean what you think they mean.

As many people head home for the holidays, it brings up the question of exactly what home means to us,

not just why individuals are willing to brave the perils of modern holiday travel to get there,

but also what the concept of home has meant to us over the history of English.

It's perhaps not that surprising that the word home is an old one, dating back to Old English haam or homom.

A similar word is also found in many languages related to English, such as the German haim or the Swedish hem, which tells us that it's a very ancient way to talk about where we're from, predating English

by thousands of years. In the words earliest use, it referred not just to a single home,

but more often to a village or a small collection of dwellings that formed a community.

This is why many settlements during old English times

in the 6th and 7th centuries included the word home as part of their names, something that was

preserved in modern place names that have a ham ending, as in Birmingham or Goodmanham.

In essence, these place names originally meant something like

dwelling place of the Goodman clan. Over time, this sense of a collective village dropped out of use,

and the word developed its more typical meaning today of a fixed place where a person or family resides. However, the idea of belonging

and community that the word first evoked persists in the way we feel about the places we come from

being more than just a matter of geography. This community sense of home is why when you ask someone where they're from, most people interpret it as a question of heritage and identity, not just the physical location where they were born.

For instance, in a study that asked adolescents in Australia to answer the question, where are you from? Researchers found that out of

605 responses, relatively few simply stated a geographic place. Most respondents also added details

about why they saw their identity tied to their homeland, ranging from, I'm from Australia because it's where I belong,

to Australia, because it's the best place in the world. The strong tendency to talk about much more

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