hearth
noun
Simple meaning
The place in a home where a fire is or was traditionally kept for home heating and for cooking.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
hahrthIPA pronunciation (US)
ˈhɑɹθ
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
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.
A fireplace: an open recess in a wall at the base of a chimney where a fire may be built.
A hearthstone, either as standalone or as the floor of an enclosed fireplace or oven.
Home symbolized as a part of the fireplace
An area near a fireplace (usually paved and extending out into a room)
“They sat on the hearth and warmed themselves before the fire.”
figurative
Home or family life.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- C1 · Advanced (estimated)
- Frequency
- Uncommon
- Formality
- Technical
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: 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.
Used this way, hearth is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a food and cooking use: everyday in kitchens and recipes.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Where it naturally appears
- Cooking/food
- Everyday conversation
Nearby words
- open fireplace , rarer, so it draws attention
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use hearth
- “They sat on the hearth and warmed themselves before the fire.”noun
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
An annual contribution made by Roman Catholics to support the papal see.
Of or relating to or produced by the open-hearth process.
A furnace for making steel in which the steel is placed on a shallow hearth and flames of burning gas and hot air play over it.
A process for making steel using an open-hearth furnace.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Synonyms
Sense: place in a home where a fire is
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.