house
We house house guests in the spare room.
The verb means to provide shelter; the noun-attributive names the place that does the sheltering. The repetition pairs the act with its setting in a single beat.
Meanings
a building for human habitation; a dwelling
- Their house has a red door.
- The house at the end of the street has been empty for years.
to provide with shelter or accommodation; to contain
- Charities house refugees during winter storms.
- The museum houses a rare collection of bronze coins.
Word origin
From Old English hūs ('dwelling, building'), from Proto-Germanic *hūsą, of obscure ultimate origin. The verb is a derivative formed by voicing the final consonant — the same noun/verb voicing alternation visible in 'use', 'abuse', 'excuse', and (with /θ/→/ð/) 'mouth' and 'bath/bathe'. In Old English the verb form was hūsian, with a voiced suffix that disappeared in Middle English; the voicing it caused on the preceding fricative survived as the only trace.
Fun fact
The /s/-to-/z/ split between noun and verb 'house' is a fossil of an Old English verb suffix — hūsian, the original verb form, had a voiced ending that was lost when Middle English shed its unstressed final syllables. The voicing the suffix had caused on the preceding consonant survived, so modern speakers preserve a thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon ending in a single fricative.