Homey vs. Homely

Welcome to The Way With Words.

Good afternoon. How are you?

Excellent. Who’s this?

This is Jenny Collins, Omaha, Nebraska.

Hi, Jenny. Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Well, Martha, I have kind of an odd little question for you.

I was watching a British home remodeling program, and I saw someone walk into a room, and they said, well, this is very homely.

And I was kind of surprised that they would say that about someone’s house, and I thought I’d misheard or that they were maybe a little rude.

And then after watching the show a few times, I realized that that’s what they say when they think a room looks kind of cozy and homey.

And so I was drawn to the idea of how could this be that the word homely means something completely opposite in the U.S. than it does in Britain.

Well, you’re exactly right. You’ve noticed a difference in how we use the word homely, whether we’re on this side of the pond or the other one.

The word homely itself goes back to, gosh, the late 1300s, early 1400s.

And very, very early on, it just meant, as you suggested, belonging to a household or a home, very much like a place where you dwell.

And pretty soon the meanings started diverging.

So you see in the U.K. that homely means something sort of like the word Hamish in English that’s adopted from Yiddish, meaning having to do with home.

And in this country, homely became a term that means more plain, something that’s just sort of ordinary, like you’d find in an ordinary household.

Exactly.

And it’s not a positive thing that you would say about someone’s house.

You wouldn’t say, this room is so homely.

People would be completely insulted if you said that.

Right, right.

It’s dramatically different depending on which type of English you’re speaking, for sure.

Jenny, there was a moment there in the history of homely where the British had both meanings.

And actually, they did use homely for a while.

But once there was a semantic space collision, as we might call it in linguistics, where one word can be taken two ways that are positive or negative, then you often find coinages appear.

And it made a lot of sense for homie to be coined on the same basic principles so that we didn’t have that semantic collision of the two meanings of homie.

By happenstance, the Americans kept homie, and homely is very distinct words, and the British still have homely, but they never adopted homie.

So they don’t use the term homie at all. They just say homely.

No, but they might also use homely to mean plain in a kind of derogatory way.

You might say it of a really rude, kind of crude structure or just the barest Spartan furnishings.

But it’s very context dependent, as you may have noticed.

Interesting.

Well, Jenny, we’re really glad you called.

Well, thank you for listening.

This has been fascinating trying to figure out what the roots of all this is.

Right.

Just one little word, right?

Yeah, one little word.

Thank you very much.

Okay.

Thanks for calling.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

We probably should have pointed out that in the United States, homely, to mean plain of appearance or even ugly, is almost always used to refer to people or animals, and we don’t nearly as often use it to refer to living spaces. It’s kind of distanced itself further away from the idea of home.

Some people might say a homely person is one who should stay at home.

But you don’t describe a homely home. Not usually, no. And I think that’s because there’s a remnant of that discrepancy of homely meaning two different things left there in our understanding of the word.

Well, what word has caught your ear or eye? Give us a call about it. 877-929-9673 or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.