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What Does Home Mean to You

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Updated: 6 November, 2023

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“What I love most about my home is who I share it with.” “There is nothing more important than a good, safe, secure home.” “Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.”

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Works Cited

• Bachelard, G. (1994). The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press.
• Boyd, H. W., & Ray, M. J. (Eds.). (2019). Home and Identity in Late Life: International Perspectives. Policy Press.
• Casey, E. S. (2000). Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Indiana University Press.
• Clark, C., & Murrell, S. A. (Eds.). (2008). Laughter, Pain, and Wonder: Shakespeare's Comedies and the Audience in the Playhouse. University of Delaware Press.
• Heidegger, M. (2010). Building, Dwelling, Thinking. In Poetry, Language, Thought (pp. 145-161). Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
• Kusenbach, M. (2003). Street Phenomenology: The Go-Along as Ethnographic Research Tool. Ethnography, 4(3), 455-485.
• Moore, L. J. (2000). Space, Text, and Gender: An Anthropological Study of the Marakwet of Kenya. Routledge.
• Rapport, N., & Dawson, A. (Eds.). (1998). Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. Berg Publishers.
• Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.
• Seamon, D. (Ed.). (2015). Place Attachment and Phenomenology: The Synergistic Dynamism of Place. Routledge.

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Essays About Home: Top 5 Examples and 7 Writing Prompts

Writing essays about home depicts familial encounters that influence our identity. Discover our guide with examples and prompts to assist you with your next essay.

The literal meaning of home is a place where you live. It’s also called a domicile where people permanently reside, but today, people have different definitions for it. A home is where we most feel comfortable. It’s a haven, a refuge that provides security and protects us without judgment. 

Parents or guardians do their best to make a home for their children. They strive to offer their kids a stable environment so they can grow into wonderful adults. Dissecting what a home needs to ensure a family member feels safe is a vital part of writing essays about home.

5 Essay Examples

1. the unique feeling of home by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 2. where i call home by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 3. a place i call home by anonymous on toppr.com, 4. the meaning of home by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 5. what makes a house a home for me by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. true meaning of home, 2. the difference between a home and a house, 3. homes and emotions, 4. making our house feel like home, 6. home as a vital part of our lives, 7. a home for a kid.

“Nowadays, as I moved out, the place feels alien since I spend the whole time in the house during my visits to my parents. They treat me like a guest in their home – in a good sense; they try to be attentive to me and induce dialogue since I stay there for a short time, and they want to extract the maximum of their need for interaction with me.”

In this essay, a visit to the author’s parents’ house made them realize the many things they missed. They also can’t help but compare it to their current home. The writer states family conflict as the reason for their moving out and realizes how fast they adapted to their new environment. 

Returning to their childhood home brings out mixed emotions as they ponder over the lasting influence of their past on their present personality. The author recognizes the importance of the experiences they carry wherever they go. In the end, the writer says that a home is anywhere they can belong to themselves and interact with those they hold dear. You might be interested in these essays about city life .

“The noteworthy places where I lived are the places I have made my home: where I can walk around with a birds’ nest on my head and a pair of old sweatpants in the middle of summer, where I can strip myself bear of superficial emotions…”

The essay starts with vivid descriptions of the author’s home, letting the reader feel like they are in the same place as the narrator. The author also considers their grandmother’s and friend’s houses his home and shares why they feel this way. 

“My home is important to me because for better or worse, it helps me belong. It makes me understand my place in time and connect with the world and the universe at large. Thus, I am grateful to have a place I can call home.”

In this essay, the author is straightforward in sharing the features of their home life, including where their house is located, who lives in it, and other specific details that make it a home. It’s an ancestral home with vintage furniture that stands strong despite age. 

The writer boasts of their unrestricted use of the rooms and how they love every part of it. However, their best memories are linked to the house’s terrace, where their family frequently spends time together.

Looking for more? Check out these essays about dream house .

“Home is a word that means a lot in the life of every person. For some, this is a place to come after hard work to relax and feel comfortable. For others, this is a kind of intermediate point from which they can set off towards adventure.”

A home is where a person spends most of their life, but in this essay, the writer explains that the definition varies per an individual’s outlook. Thus, the piece incorporates various definitions and concepts from other writers. One of them is Veronica Greenwood , who associates homes with a steaming bowl of ramen because both provide warmth, comfort, and tranquility. The author concludes by recognizing individuals’ ever-changing feelings and emotions and how these changes affect their perception of the concept of a home.

“It is where the soul is…  what makes my house a home is walking through the front door on a Friday evening after praying Zuhr prayer in the masjid and coming back to the aroma of freshly cooked delicious biryani in the kitchen because my mom knows it’s my favorite meal.”

This essay reflects on the factors that shape a house to become a home. These factors include providing security, happiness, and comfort. The author explains that routine household activities such as cooking at home, watching children, and playing games significantly contribute to how a home is created. In the end, the writer says that a house becomes a home when you produce special memories with the people you love.

7 Prompts for Essays About Home

The definition of a home varies depending on one’s perspective. Use this prompt to discuss what the word “home” means to you. Perhaps home is filled with memories, sentimental items, or cozy decor, or maybe home is simply where your family is. Write a personal essay with your experiences and add the fond memories you have with your family home.

Check out our guide on how to write a personal essay .

Home and house are two different terms with deeper meanings. However, they are used interchangeably in verbal and written communication. A house is defined as a structure existing in the physical sense. Meanwhile, a home is where people feel like they belong and are free to be themselves.

In your essay, compare and contrast these words and discuss if they have the same meaning or not. Add some fun to your writing by interviewing people to gather opinions on the difference between these two words.

The emotions that we associate with our home can be influenced by our upbringing. In this essay, discuss how your childhood shaped how you view your home and include the reasons why. Split this essay into sections, each new section describing a different memory in your house. Make sure to include personal experiences and examples to support your feelings.

For example, if you grew up in a home that you associate positive memories with, you will have a happy and peaceful association with your home. However, if your upbringing had many challenging and stressful times, you may have negative emotions tied to the home.

The people inside our home play a significant role in how a house becomes a home. Parents, siblings, and pets are only some of those that influence a home. In this prompt, write about the items in your home, the people, and the activities that have made your house a home.

Describe your home in detail to make the readers understand your home life. Talk about the physical characteristics of your house, what the people you live with make you feel, and what you look forward to every time you visit your home. You can also compare it to your current home. For example, you can focus your essay on the differences between your childhood home and the place you moved in to start your independent life.

Home is the one place we always go back to; even if we visit other places, our home is waiting for our return. In this prompt, provide relevant statistics about how much time a person spends at home and ensure to consider relevant factors such as their profession and age group. Using these statistics, explain the importance of a home to the general population, including the indications of homelessness.

There are 135,000 children adopted in the US each year. These children become orphans for various reasons and are adopted by their guardians to support and guide them through life. For this prompt, find statistics showing the number of unaccompanied and homeless children.

Then, write down the government programs and organizations that aim to help these kids. In the later part of your essay, you can discuss tips on how a foster family can make their foster kids feel at home. For help picking your next essay topic, check out our 20 engaging essay topics about family .

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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The Meaning of Home Essay

Home is a word that means a lot in the life of every person. For some, this is a place to come after hard work to relax and feel comfortable. For others, this is a kind of intermediate point from which they can set off towards adventure. Still, others believe that the home is not some specific place but where the closest and dearest people gather. However, everyone’s life should have a home as a place to reboot, energize and comfort. This allows people to stay afloat even in the most challenging times and know that there is a safe corner in this world where they can ride out the storm.

Various authors put different emotions and thoughts into the concept of home. For example, Joan Didion (1967) has a particular view of the concept of home. She believes that home is the place where her closest and dearest people are. She loves to visit her family to feel a sense of unity and be close to loved ones. In this house, time seems to slow down, and no matter what happens in life, home is always a place where she can meet people that are ready to support and understand her. This view of a home is quite common: “home is where the heart is.”

Having close people is an integral part of everyone’s life, even from a biological perspective. People need to feel like they belong to a specific group to always be able to receive support. In addition, no matter how the family criticizes us, it still accepts us with all the shortcomings and rash actions. We are part of a family, so it will be difficult to “break away” from it. However, it is necessary to remember that this is a two-way communication and maintain it. Not only seek help from relatives in difficult times but also help them if necessary. This is what will help build a secure family-related feeling of “home.”

Some people associate home with warm memories of the past, while in the present, this concept becomes, perhaps, more blurred. For example, for Veronique Greenwood (2014), the home was strongly associated with a warm, steaming bowl of ramen. Every day at school, she skipped lunch to read more books and came home in the late afternoon. Hunger “overtook” her, and every day she saved herself by making herself a bowl of hot ramen soup. She began to associate this warmth and satiety with a feeling of calmness, security, and comfort – at home.

No matter how hard life is, some people may indeed have some tiny detail that becomes reliable support. Thus, for example, a warm soup is one of the few things that could support the girl. However, it helped her survive all the difficulties of adolescence. She knew she had a home, a place filled with warmth and comfort. Thanks to this support, she was able to find her place in life and grow up as a worthy person.

Pico Iyer (2013) reveals an exciting and unusual vision of the home in his speech. He argues that the home cannot be a specific point on the map for many people since people and their lives are constantly changing. For some, the parental house becomes home; for others – a favorite place to travel; for some – a country to which they dream of moving all their lives. People collect the concept of a home throughout their lives, and it becomes a mosaic made up of diverse parts that are unique to everyone.

As a result, the home becomes not what is at a certain point on the map but what leaves the greatest response in the soul. Each person’s experience is unique, so everyone has an unusual and unique feeling of home in their hearts. Thanks to this, we recognize the most important places, events, and people in our life. It is what becomes our “home” that forms the basis of our personalities and influences us.

For me, the concept of “home” is now most closely related to the idea of the parental home. My family lives there, and I feel our closeness; I understand that I can always get help, support, and care in this place. I know that the most comfortable atmosphere of trust and warmth is there. However, I understand that my thoughts and feelings about the concept of home can change dramatically over time. For example, if I move to another city or start my own family, I will feel this concept differently. However, I know that my family’s home will always remain dear to me; that is, it will still be an essential component of the concept of “home.” Therefore, you must always carefully listen to yourself, look for your home, and collect it bit by bit from different parts of life. This will help you feel calmer and know that in some place, someone is waiting for you with love and support.

Didion, J. (1967). On going home.

Greenwood, V. (2014). How ramen got me through adolescence . The New York Times Magazine. Web.

Iyer, P. (2013). Where is home? [Video]. TED. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, October 22). The Meaning of Home. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-meaning-of-home/

"The Meaning of Home." IvyPanda , 22 Oct. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-meaning-of-home/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'The Meaning of Home'. 22 October.

IvyPanda . 2022. "The Meaning of Home." October 22, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-meaning-of-home/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Meaning of Home." October 22, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-meaning-of-home/.

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IvyPanda . "The Meaning of Home." October 22, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-meaning-of-home/.

The Definition of Home

Be it ever so humble, it’s more than just a place. It’s also an idea—one where the heart is

Verlyn Klinkenborg

When did “home” become embedded in human consciousness? Is our sense of home instinctive? Are we denning animals or nest builders, or are we, at root, nomadic? For much of the earliest history of our species, home may have been nothing more than a small fire and the light it cast on a few familiar faces, surrounded perhaps by the ancient city-mounds of termites. But whatever else home is—and however it entered our consciousness—it’s a way of organizing space in our minds. Home is home, and everything else is not-home. That’s the way the world is constructed.

Not that you can’t feel “at home” in other places. But there’s a big psychological difference between feeling at home and being home. Feeling at home on the Tiwi Islands or in Bangalore or Vancouver (if you are not native) is simply a way of saying that the not-home-ness of those places has diminished since you first arrived. Some people, as they move through their lives, rediscover home again and again. Some people never find another after once leaving home. And, of course, some people never leave the one home they’ve always known. In America, we don’t know quite what to say about those people.

Homesick children know how sharp the boundary between home and not-home can be because they suffer from the difference, as if it were a psychological thermocline. I know because I was one of them. I felt a deep kinship almost everywhere in the small Iowa town I grew up in. But spending the night away from home, at a sleepover with friends, made every street, every house seem alien. And yet there was no rejoicing when I got back home in the morning. Home was as usual. That was the point—home is a place so profoundly familiar you don’t even have to notice it. It’s everywhere else that takes noticing.

In humans, the idea of home almost completely displaces the idea of habitat. It’s easy to grasp the fact that a vireo’s nest is not the same as her habitat and that her habitat is her true home. The nest is a temporary annual site for breeding, useful only as long as there are young to raise. But we are such generalists—able to live in so many places—that “habitat,” when applied to humans, is nearly always a metaphor. To say, “My home is my habitat” is true and untrue at the same time.

Yet our psychological habitat is shaped by what you might call the magnetic property of home, the way it aligns everything around us. Perhaps you remember a moment, coming home from a trip, when the house you call home looked, for a moment, like just another house on a street full of houses. For a fraction of a second, you could see your home as a stranger might see it. But then the illusion faded and your house became home again. That, I think, is one of the most basic meanings of home—a place we can never see with a stranger’s eyes for more than a moment.

And there’s something more. When my father died, my brothers and sisters and I went back to his house, where he’d lived alone. It wasn’t only his absence we felt. It was as though something had vanished from every object in the house. They had, in fact, become merely objects. The person whose heart and mind could bind them into a single thing—a home—had gone.

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Why is home so important to us?

Home: A Very Short Introduction

Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday , subscribe to Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS , and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook . This series is also available online , and you can recommend it to your local librarian .

• By Michael Allen Fox
• December 30 th 2016

“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.” “Home is where the heart is.” These well-known expressions indicate that home is somewhere that is both desirable and that exists in the mind’s eye as much as in a particular physical location. Across cultures and over the centuries people of varied means have made homes for themselves and for those they care about. Humans have clearly evolved to be home builders, homemakers, and home-nesters. Dwellings that are recognizable as homes have been found everywhere that archaeologists and anthropologists have looked, representing every era of history and prehistory.

Home has always been a gathering place, shelter, and sanctuary, providing escape from the busyness and intrusiveness of the world. Much thought about, treasured, and longed for as an anchor of our existence, home has been the subject of abundant written works and other cultural products. We might reasonably suppose, therefore, that home is a readily understood concept and source of universally positive feelings. On closer investigation, however, neither of these assumptions is found to be true. The concept of home is constructed differently by different languages; dwellings are built and lived in very differently by diverse groups; and many individuals have negative or mixed emotions in regard to their experiences of home life. To embrace all of the nuances of meaning, outlook, lifestyle, and feeling that attach to home is a daunting task, but it greatly enriches our perspective on the world.

For many, home is (or was) a loving, supportive environment in which to grow up and discover oneself. Most people will have more than one home in a lifetime, and if the original one was unhappy, there is always the opportunity to do better when creating a new home. This may not as easy as it sounds for those whose memory of home is of an oppressive or abusive situation from which escape is (or was) a desperate imperative. But even when it is a peaceful, loving environment, home is, for all of us, a political sphere wherein we must negotiate rights and privileges, make compromises, and seek empowerment through self-affirmation.

As an ideal that exists in the imagination, and in dreams and wish fulfilments, home carries many and varied symbolic meanings embedded in the physical design of houses and projected onto them by the belief systems within which our lives play out. The landscape, geopolitical location, the people who live with us, and material possessions with which we furnish our home space are essential aspects of the place where we dwell. Complex interactions with all of these elements give definition to home as we see it. And as we define home, we also define ourselves in relation to it.

In recent times, home has become a more problematic notion, not only because of everyday encounters with our homeless fellow citizens, but also because of the great increase in immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, and victims of natural disasters in many parts of the world. Given the strong meanings and emotional associations that home has for us, those who have lost their homes and the things they most valued, or who have never had a proper home in the first place, face psychological impacts and identity crises of massive proportions. Being without a home is devastating on personal, social, and many other levels. The issues raised by homelessness exist on a world scale, and will be aggravated by climate change and rising populations. In the end, they can only be dealt with through united effort driven by compassion and dedication.

On the hopeful side of things, many immigrants have been welcomed into new countries for some time, and have made successful and rewarding lives there for themselves, as well as broadening the experience and culture of their adopted homelands. Living in the space age and the age of greater environmental awareness, we are also collectively making the first steps toward appreciating the Earth we share as our ultimate home, and as the place above all that we need to respect and protect. Thinking about home takes us into our inner selves, to be sure, but it also encourages us to look at things in their totality.

Why is home so important to us, then? Because for better or worse, by presence or absence, it is a crucial point of reference—in memory, feeling, and imagination—for inventing the story of ourselves, our life-narrative, for understanding our place in time. But it is also a vital link through which we connect with others and with the world and the universe at large.

Featured image credit: Home building residence by image4you. Public Domain via Pixabay .

Michael Allen Fox is Adjunct Professor, School of Humanities, University of New England, Australia, and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His main research interests are in the areas of nineteenth-century European philosophy, existentialism, environmental philosophy, ethics and animals, and philosophy of peace. He is the author of  Home: A Very Short Introduction .

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Module 3: Definition Essay

How to write a definition essay.

A definition essay can be deceivingly difficult to write. This type of paper requires you to write a personal yet academic definition of one specific word. The definition must be thorough and lengthy. It is essential that you choose a word that will give you plenty to write about, and there are a few standard tactics you can use to elaborate on the term. Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when writing a definition essay.

Part 1 of 3: Choosing the Right Word

1: choose an abstract word with a complex meaning. [1].

A simple word that refers to a concrete word will not give you much to write about, but a complex word that refers to an abstract concept provides more material to explore.

• Typically, nouns that refer to a person, place, or thing are too simple for a definition essay. Nouns that refer to an idea work better, however, as do most adjectives.
• For example, the word “house” is fairly simple and an essay written around it may be dull. By switching to something slightly more abstract like “home,” however, you can play around with the definition more. A “home” is a concept, and there are many elements involved in the creation of a “home.” In comparison, a “house” is merely a structure.

2: Make sure that the word is disputable.

Aside from being complex, the word should also refer to something that can mean different things to different people.

• A definition essay is somewhat subjective by nature since it requires you to analyze and define a word from your own perspective. If the answer you come up with after analyzing a word is the same answer anyone else would come up with, your essay may appear to lack depth.

3: Choose a word you have some familiarity with.

Dictionary definitions can only tell you so much. Since you need to elaborate on the word you choose to define, you will need to have your own base of knowledge or experience with the concept you choose.

• For instance, if you have never heard the term “pedantic,” your understanding of the word will be limited. You can introduce yourself to the word for your essay, but without previous understanding of the concept, you will not know if the definition you describe is truly fitting.

4: Read the dictionary definition.

While you will not be relying completely on the dictionary definition for your essay, familiarizing yourself with the official definition will allow you to compare your own understanding of the concept with the simplest, most academic explanation of it.

• As an example, one definition of “friend” is “a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.” [2] Your own ideas or beliefs about what a “friend” really is likely include much more information, but this basic definition can present you with a good starting point in forming your own.

5:  Research the word’s origins.

Look up your chosen word in the Oxford English Dictionary or in another etymology dictionary. [3]

• These sources can tell you the history behind a word, which can provide further insight on a general definition as well as information about how a word came to mean what it means today.

Part 2 of 3: Potential Elements of an Effective Definition

1: write an analysis. [4].

Separate a word into various parts. Analyze and define each part in its own paragraph.

• You can separate “return” into “re-” and “turn.” The word “friendship” can be separated into “friend” and “ship.”
• In order to analyze each portion of a word, you will still need to use additional defining tactics like negation and classification.
• Note that this tactic only works for words that contain multiple parts. The word “love,” for instance, cannot be broken down any further. If defining “platonic love,” though, you could define both “platonic” and “love” separately within your essay.

2:  Classify the term.

Specify what classes and parts of speech a word belongs to according to a standard dictionary definition.

• While this information is very basic and dry, it can provide helpful context about the way that a given word is used.

3: Compare an unfamiliar term to something familiar.

An unfamiliar or uncommon concept can be explained using concepts that are more accessible to the average person.

• Many people have never heard of the term “confrere,” for instance. One basic definition is “a fellow member of a profession, fraternity, etc.” As such, you could compare “confrere” with “colleague,” which is a similar yet more familiar concept. [5]

4:  Provide traditional details about the term.

Explain any physical characteristics or traditional thoughts used to describe your term of choice.

• The term “home” is often visualized physically as a house or apartment. In more abstract terms, “home” is traditionally thought to be a warm, cozy, and safe environment. You can include all of these features in a definition essay on “home.”

5: Use examples to illustrate the meaning.

People often relate to stories and vivid images, so using a fitting story or image that relates to the term can be used in clarifying an abstract, formless concept.

• In a definition essay about “kindness,” for example, you could write about an act of kindness you recently witnessed. Someone who mows the lawn of an elderly neighbor is a valid example, just as someone who gave you an encouraging word when you were feeling down might be.

6: Use negation to explain what the term does not mean.

If a term is often misused or misunderstood, mentioning what it is not is an effective way to bring the concept into focus.

• A common example would be the term “courage.” The term is often associated with a lack of fear, but many will argue that “courage” is more accurately described as acting in spite of fear.

7: Provide background information.

This is when your research about the etymology of a word will come in handy. Explain where the term originated and how it came to mean what it currently means.

Part 3 of 3: Definition Essay Structure

1: introduce the standard definition..

You need to clearly state what your word is along with its traditional or dictionary definition in your introductory paragraph.

• By opening with the dictionary definition of your term, you create context and a basic level of knowledge about the word. This will allow you to introduce and elaborate on your own definition.
• This is especially significant when the traditional definition of your term varies from your own definition in notable ways.

2: Define the term in your own words in your thesis.

Your actual thesis statement should define the term in your own words.

• Keep the definition in your thesis brief and basic. You will elaborate on it more in the body of your paper.
• Avoid using passive phrases involving the word “is” when defining your term. The phrases “is where” and “is when” are especially clunky. [6]
• Do not repeat part of the defined term in your definition.

3:  Separate different parts of the definition into separate paragraphs.

Each tactic or method used to define your term should be explored in a separate paragraph.

• Note that you do not need to use all the possible methods of defining a term in your essay. You should use a variety of different methods in order to create a full, well-rounded picture of the term, but some tactics will work great with some terms but not with others.

4: Conclude with a summary of your main points.

Briefly summarize your main points around the start of your concluding paragraph.

• This summary does not need to be elaborate. Usually, looking at the topic sentence of each body paragraph is a good way to form a simple list of your main points.
• You can also draw the essay to a close by referring to phrases or images evoked in your introduction.

5: Mention how the definition has affected you, if desired.

If the term you define plays a part in your own life and experiences, your final concluding remarks are a good place to briefly mention the role it plays.

• Relate your experience with the term to the definition you created for it in your thesis. Avoid sharing experiences that relate to the term but contradict everything you wrote in your essay.

Sources and Citations

• http://www.roanestate.edu/owl/Definition.html
• http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/friend?s=t
• http://www.etymonline.com/
• http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/definition.html
• http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/confrere?s=t
• http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/definition.htm
• How to Write a Definition Essay. Provided by : WikiHow. Located at : http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Definition-Essay . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

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How to Write a Definition Essay

Last Updated: January 27, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Alexander Ruiz, M.Ed. . Alexander Ruiz is an Educational Consultant and the Educational Director of Link Educational Institute, a tutoring business based in Claremont, California that provides customizable educational plans, subject and test prep tutoring, and college application consulting. With over a decade and a half of experience in the education industry, Alexander coaches students to increase their self-awareness and emotional intelligence while achieving skills and the goal of achieving skills and higher education. He holds a BA in Psychology from Florida International University and an MA in Education from Georgia Southern University. There are 12 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 453,095 times.

A definition essay requires you to write your own definition of a word. The definition must be thorough and well supported by research and evidence. You may have to write a definition essay for a class or try it as a writing challenge to help improve your English skills. Start by selecting and defining the word. Then, create a draft that presents a detailed definition using references and sources. Polish the essay when you are done so it flows well and does not contain any grammatical errors.

Selecting the Word

• You can also pick a concept like “Success,” “Friendship,” or “Faith.”
• Concepts like “Pain,” “Loss,” or “Death” are also good options.

• You can try taking a concrete object and using a similar word to make it more open-ended. For example, the word “house” is concrete and obvious. But the word “home” is more open-ended and allows you to create your own definition of the word.

• For example, you may choose a word like “success” because you are familiar with the word and feel you may have a lot to say about what it means to be successful or to feel success in your life.

• For example, you may choose a word like “pain” because you feel there are a variety of meanings for the word based on who you talk to and how they experience “pain” in their lives.

Defining the Word

• For example, if you look up the word “justice” in the dictionary, you may get this definition: “noun, the quality of being just; righteousness, equitableness, or moral rightness.”
• You can then determine that “justice” is a noun and can be compared to other terms like “righteousness” and “moral rightness.”

• For example, you may look up the word “justice” in an online encyclopedia that focuses on philosophy or law. You may then find information on Western theories of justice and how it became an important concept in Western history and the legal system.

• Look on academic search engines like Google Scholar, JSTOR, and ProQuest for scholarly articles.
• You can also look for educational videos that have been made about the word on YouTube and other video websites.

• “What comes to mind when you think of the word?”
• “How do you feel about the word on a personal level?”
• “How do you interact or deal with the word?”
• “What does the word mean to you?”
• Take notes or record the interviews so you can use them as sources in your essay.

• For example, you may write: “Justice, a quality or trait where you act in a morally right way.” Or you may write: “Justice, a concept in the legal system where the fair or equitable thing is done, as in ‘justice has been served.’”
• It's important to have tact and tread carefully here. It's important to preface your own definition of the word, making it clear that's a personal opinion. Make sure not to create the misconception that your own definition is the accepted or official one.
• At the end of the day, your objective should be to write the actual definition, and not an opinion essay.

Creating an Essay Draft

• Your thesis statement should appear in the introduction and conclusion section of your essay.

• For example, you may write, “According to the Oxford Dictionary, justice is a noun, and it means: the quality of being just; righteousness, equitableness, or moral rightness.”

• For example, you may have a thesis statement like, “According to my research and my personal experiences, justice is a quality or trait where you act in a morally correct way.”

• For example, you may write, “Justice comes from the Latin jus , which means right or law. It is a commonly used concept in politics, in the legal system, and in philosophy.”

• For example, you may discuss how justice works as a noun or an idea in politics, the legal system, and in philosophy. You may also discuss what the “quality of being just” means in our society.

• For example, you may talk about how justice is similar and also not quite the same as words like “righteousness” and “equitableness.”
• You can also discuss words that mean the opposite of the term you are defining. For example, you may contrast the word “justice” with the word “injustice” or “inequality.”

• For example, you may write, “On a personal level, I view justice as an essential concept” or “Based on my own experiences, I think justice is blind and often does not serve those who need it the most.”
• You can also include personal experiences of the word based on interviews you conducted with others.

• Make sure you follow your instructor’s preferred citation style, such as MLA , APA , or Chicago Style .

• Look at the first sentence in each section of the paragraph to help you gather your main points.
• Include a last sentence that has a strong image or that describes a key phrase in your essay.

Polishing the Essay

• You should also check for any spelling, grammar, or punctuation errors in the essay.

• Be open to constructive criticism from others and take their feedback to heart. It will only make your essay better.

• If there is a word count or a page count for the definition essay, make sure you meet it.
• Include a reference page at the end of the essay and a cover page at the beginning of the essay, if required.

Expert Q&A

You Might Also Like

Expert Interview

Thanks for reading our article! If you'd like to learn more about writing essays, check out our in-depth interview with Alexander Ruiz, M.Ed. .

• ↑ https://owl.excelsior.edu/rhetorical-styles/definition-essay/
• ↑ https://open.lib.umn.edu/writingforsuccess/chapter/10-6-definition/
• ↑ https://quillbot.com/courses/introduction-to-college-level-academic-writing/chapter/how-to-write-a-definition-essay/
• ↑ https://examples.yourdictionary.com/definition-essay-examples-and-topic-ideas.html
• ↑ https://owlcation.com/humanities/How-to-Write-a-Definition-Essay-from-Multiple-Sources
• ↑ https://academichelp.net/academic-assignments/essay/write-definition-essay.html
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/common_writing_assignments/definitions.html
• ↑ https://owl.excelsior.edu/rhetorical-styles/definition-essay/definition-essay-techniques/
• ↑ https://quillbot.com/courses/rhetorical-methods-based-essay-writing/chapter/how-to-write-a-definition-essay/
• ↑ https://wts.indiana.edu/writing-guides/using-evidence.html
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/reading-aloud/
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/proofreading/steps_for_revising.html

About This Article

To write a definition essay, choose a word that describes a concept or idea. Look up the dictionary definition, the origin of the word, and any scholarly essays or articles that discuss the word in detail, then use this information to create your own definition. When you write your paper, introduce the term and the standard dictionary definition of the word, followed by a thesis stating your own definition. Use the body of the paper to include historical information and explain what the word means to you, then conclude by restating your thesis. For tips on picking your word, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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The Meaning of Home, by John Berger

Scrapbook of Styles

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

A highly regarded art critic, novelist, poet, essayist, and screenwriter, John Berger began his career as a painter in London. Among his best-known works are Ways of Seeing (1972), a series of essays about the power of visual images, and G. (also 1972), an experimental novel which was awarded both the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction .

In this passage from And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984), Berger draws on the writings of Mircea Eliade, a Romanian-born historian of religion, to offer an extended definition of home .

The Meaning of Home

by John Berger

The term home (Old Norse Heimer , High German heim , Greek komi , meaning "village") has, since a long time, been taken over by two kinds of moralists, both dear to those who wield power. The notion of home became the keystone for a code of domestic morality, safeguarding the property (which included the women) of the family. Simultaneously the notion of homeland supplied the first article of faith for patriotism, persuading men to die in wars which often served no other interest except that of a minority of their ruling class. Both usages have hidden the original meaning.

Originally home meant the center of the world—not in a geographical, but in an ontological sense. Mircea Eliade has demonstrated how the home was the place from which the world could be founded . A home was established, as he says, "at the heart of the real." In traditional societies, everything that made sense of the world was real; the surrounding chaos existed and was threatening, but it was threatening because it was unreal . Without a home at the center of the real, one was not only shelterless but also lost in nonbeing, in unreality. Without a home everything was fragmentation.​

Home was the center of the world because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal one. The vertical line was a path leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld. The horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, all the possible roads leading across the earth to other places. Thus, at home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and to the dead of the underworld. This nearness promised access to both. And at the same time, one was at the starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys. *  Originally published in  And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos , by John Berger (Pantheon Books, 1984).

Selected Works by John Berger

• A Painter of Our Time , novel (1958)
• Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing , essays (1962)
• The Look of Things , essays (1972)
• Ways of Seeing , essays (1972)
• G. , novel (1972)
• Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 , screenplay (1976)
• Pig Earth , novel (1979)
• The Sense of Sight , essays (1985)
• Once in Europe , novel (1987)
• Keeping a Rendezvous , essays (1991)
• To the Wedding , novel (1995)
• Photocopies , essays (1996)
• Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance , essays (2007)
• From A to X , novel (2008)
• 5 Rivers of the Greek Underworld
• Learn How to Use Extended Definitions in Essays and Speeches
• 60 Writing Topics for Extended Definitions
• Using Links to Create Vertical Navigation Menus
• The Ancient Greek Underworld and Hades
• The Basics of Lines and How to Use Them in Design
• How Many Trips Hercules Made to the Underworld
• Identify the Coordinates Worksheets
• The Gable and the Gable Wall
• Biography of Euripides, Third of the Great Tragedians
• What Were the Elysian Fields in Greek Mythology?
• 6 Realistic Styles in Modern Art
• Formula for the Normal Distribution or Bell Curve
• Slope Formula to Find Rise over Run
• The Underworld Adventure of Aeneas in The Aeneid

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What Makes a House a Home?

Meghan daum on the complexities of where we take shelter.

In the canon of common dreams, it’s a classic among classics: the dream in which we discover an unfamiliar room in a familiar house. The way it usually goes is that we’re in some kind of living space, maybe our own, maybe a space that’s inexplicably taken some other form (“It was my grandmother’s house, but somehow the prime minister of France lived there!”), and suddenly there’s more of it. Suddenly the place has grown a new appendage. But it’s not exactly new. There’s a sense that it’s been there all along yet has managed to escape our notice. Sometimes there’s just one new room, sometimes there are several. Sometimes there’s an entire wing, a greenhouse, a vast expanse of land where we’d once only known a small backyard.

We are amazed, enchanted, even chastened by our failure to have seen this space before now. We are also, according to psychologists and dream experts, working through the prospect of change, the burgeoning of new possibilities. The standard interpretation of the extra-room dream is that it’s a portent, or just a friendly reminder, of shifting tides. The room represents parts of ourselves that have lain dormant but will soon emerge, hopefully in a good way, but then again, who knows? Look harder , says the extra-room dream, the geometry of your life is not what it seems. There are more sides than you thought . The angles are wider , the dimensions far greater than you’d given them credit for .

Not that we can hear much on that frequency. The human mind can be tragically literal. Chances are we exit the dream thinking only that our property value has increased. But upon fully waking up, the extra room is gone. There’s a brief moment of disappointment, then we enter our day and return to our life. We organize our movements in relation to the architecture that is physically before us. That is to say, we live our lives in the spaces we’ve chosen to call home.

Let’s get one thing straight. A house is not the same as a home. Home is an idea, a social construct, a story we tell ourselves about who we are and who and what we want closest in our midst. There is no place like home because home is not actually a place. A house on the other hand (or an apartment, a trailer, a cabin, a castle, a loft, a yurt) is a physical entity. It may be the flesh and bones of a home, but it can’t capture the soul of that home. The soul is made of cooking smells and scuffmarks on the stairs and pencil lines on a wall recording the heights of growing children. The soul evolves over time. The old saying might go, “You buy a house but you make a home,” but, really, you grow a home. You let it unfold on its own terms. You wait for it. Home is rarely in the mix the day we move into a new house. Sometimes it’s not even there the day we move out. It’s possible we should consider ourselves lucky if we get one real home in a lifetime, the same way we’re supposedly lucky if we get one great love.

“All architecture is shelter,” said the postmodernist Philip Johnson. “All great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.”

If all architecture, no matter its purpose, is shelter, then architecture intended as shelter must be the ultimate haven. If an airport or a library can cuddle, exalt, and stimulate, a house’s embrace must be at once profoundly intimate and ecstatically transportive, erotic even.

I guess this is where I come clean. I write this as a person for whom houses can have an almost aphrodisiacal quality. I say “almost” because the other charge I get from a beautiful house feels like something close to the divine. A perfect house—and by that I mean a respected house, one that was honorably designed and solidly built and allowed to keep its integrity henceforth—is a tiny cathedral. But a perfect house is also lust made manifest. It can make its visitors delirious with longing. It can send butterflies into their bellies in ways a living, breathing human being rarely can. A house that’s an object of lust says, You want me, but you’ll never have me . It says, You couldn’t have me even if you could afford me. You couldn’t have me even if I didn’t already belong to someone else . And that is because houses, like most objects of lust, lose their perfection the moment we’re granted access. To take possession of a house is to skim the top off of its magic the minute you sign the deed. It is to concede that the house you live in will never be the house you desired so ravenously. It is to accept that the American dream of homeownership is contingent upon letting go of other dreams—for instance, the kind where the rooms appear where there were none before.

Maybe that’s why architects are such sources of fascination, even aspiration. If they want an extra room, they just draw it. If they want a bigger window, a wider archway, a whole new everything, the pencil will make it so. At least that’s the layperson’s fantasy. It’s not surprising that so many fictional heroes in literature and film are architects. The profession, especially when practiced by men, seems to lend itself to a particularly satisfying montage of dreamboat moments. Here he is, artistic and sensitive at his drafting table. Here he is, perched on the steel framework of a construction site high above the earth, hard hat on his head, building plans tucked under his arm in a scroll. Here he is, gazing skyward at his final creation, his face lit by the sun’s refraction off his glass and steel, awestruck by the majesty of it all and awesome in his own right.

Nearly always, these are men on a mission. Theirs is not a vocation but a passion that both guides them and threatens to ruin them. In Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead (perhaps the ne plus ultra of architect fetishization), the grindingly uncompromising Howard Roark winds up laboring at a quarry because he won’t betray his aesthetic principles. In Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case , the internationally renowned but existentially bereft architect hero flees to a leper colony for solace. Hollywood, too, seems to prefer its architects miserable and brooding, not just in the form of adorably widowed dads like Tom Hanks’s character in Sleepless in Seattle and Liam Neeson’s in Love Actually (and wasn’t the distinctly non-brooding architect patriarch of The Brady Bunch technically a widowed dad?) but also adorably commitment-phobic boyfriends and jealous, cuckolded husbands. More often than not, the intensity of their vision has contributed mightily to their demise. Why did Woody Harrelson’s character, a struggling architect, let Robert Redford’s character sleep with his wife for a million dollars in Indecent Proposal ? Because he was deeply in debt from trying to build his dream house.

Well, what better way to go down?

I think part of my problem with “Where is home?” (and the arguably worse “Where are you from?”) is that it denies people their complications. We all have one definitive birthplace (unless we were born at sea or in flight, I suppose), but after that it’s a matter of interpretation. The dwellings in which we are raised do not necessarily constitute “home.” The towns where we grow up do not always feel like hometowns, nor do the places we wind up settling down in as adults. Census data tell us that the average American moves eleven times over a lifetime. For my part, I’m sorry to say I have lived in at least thirty different houses or apartments over the course of my years. Actually, I’m not sorry; each one thrilled me in its own way. But despite those thrills, only a handful felt anything like “home,” and even then, the feeling was the kind that visits you for a moment and then flutters away. As with “happiness,” another abstraction Americans are forever trying to isolate and define, “home” has always felt to me so ephemeral as to almost not be worth talking about. As with happiness, it’s great when you happen upon it, but it can’t be chased.

A house, on the other hand, is eminently chaseable. There’s a reason shopping for a house or an apartment is called hunting. Real estate turns us into predators. We can stalk a house online or from the street. We can obsess over it, fight over it, mentally move into it and start knocking down walls before we’ve even been inside. We can spend Sundays going to open houses as though going to church. We can watch home design programs on television twenty-four hours a day. We can become addicted to Internet real estate listing sites as though the photos and descriptions were a form of pornography—which of course they totally are.

“I wish I had never seen your building,” says Patricia Neal as Dominique Francon, the austere and tortured lover-then-wife of Howard Roark in the film version of The Fountainhead . “It’s the things we admire or want that enslave us.”

It’s pretty clear that houses, despite being among our greatest sources of protection, are also among our greatest enslavers. You might say that’s because we go into too much debt for them and make them too large and fill them with too much junk. You might say it’s because they’re forever demanding our attention, always threatening to leak or crack and be in the way of a tornado. They are sanctuaries, but they are also impending disasters. And most tyrannically of all, they are mirrors. They are tireless, merciless reflections of our best and worst impulses. Unlike the chaos and unsightliness of the outside world, which can easily be construed as hardly our responsibility, the scene under our roofs is of our own making. The careless sides of ourselves—the clutter, the dust, that kitchen drawer jammed with uncategorizable detritus that plagues every household—are as much a part of us as the curated side. Our houses are not just showplaces but hiding places.

Our homes, on the other hand, are glorious, maddening no-places. They are what we spend our lives searching for or running away from or both. They are the stuff of dreams, the extra rooms that vanish upon waking, the invisible possibilities we tamp down without even knowing it. They are the architecture of the unconscious mind—which is a physically uninhabitable space. Thank goodness there are people out there building houses.

__________________________________

From   The American Idea of Home: Conversations about Architecture and Design   by Bernard Friedman. Used with permission of University of Texas Press. Foreword copyright 2017 by Meghan Daum.

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The Psychology of Home: Why Where You Live Means So Much

There's a reason why the first thing we often ask someone when we meet them, right after we learn their name, is "where's home for you?"

My house is a shrine to my homes. There's a triptych of sunsets next to my bedroom door, dusk forever falling over the small Michigan town where I grew up, the beach next to my college dorm and Place de la Concorde in Paris, where I spent a cliché but nonetheless happy semester. And that's only the beginning. Typographic posters of Michigan and Chicago hang above my bed, a photo of taxis zooming around Manhattan sits atop my dresser and a postcard of my hometown's famous water tower is taped to my door. My roommate and I have an entire wall in our kitchen plastered with maps of places we've been, and twin Ferris wheels, one at Navy Pier, one at Place de la Concorde, are stacked on top of one another in my living room.

I considered each of those places my home at one time or another, whether it was for months or years. When laid out all together, the theme to my décor becomes painfully obvious, but why it was more important to me to display the places I've lived rather than pictures of friends, or favorite music or books, all of which are also meaningful, I couldn't initially say.

Susan Clayton, an environmental psychologist at the College of Wooster, says that for many people, their home is part of their self-definition, which is why we do things like decorate our houses and take care of our lawns. These large patches of vegetation serve little real purpose, but they are part of a public face people put on, displaying their home as an extension of themselves. It's hardly rare, though, in our mobile modern society, to accumulate several different homes over the course of a lifetime. So how does that affect our conception of ourselves?

For better or worse, the place where we grew up usually retains an iconic status, Clayton says. But while it's human nature to want to have a place to belong, we also want to be special, and defining yourself as someone who once lived somewhere more interesting than the suburbs of Michigan is one way to do that. "You might choose to identify as a person who used to live somewhere else, because it makes you distinctive," Clayton says. I know full well that living in Paris for three months doesn't make me a Parisian, but that doesn't mean there's not an Eiffel Tower on my shower curtain anyway.

We may use our homes to help distinguish ourselves, but the dominant Western viewpoint is that regardless of location, the individual remains unchanged. It wasn't until I stumbled across the following notion, mentioned in passing in a book about a Hindu pilgrimage by William S. Sax, that I began to question that idea: "People and the places where they reside are engaged in a continuing set of exchanges; they have determinate, mutual effects upon each other because they are part of a single, interactive system."

This is the conception of home held by many South Asians and it fascinated me so much that I set out to write this story. What I learned, in talking with Sax, is that while in the West we may feel sentimental or nostalgic attachment to the places we've lived, in the end we see them as separate from our inner selves. Most Westerners believe that "your psychology, and your consciousness and your subjectivity don't really depend on the place where you live," Sax says. "They come from inside -- from inside your brain, or inside your soul or inside your personality." But for many South Asian communities, a home isn't just where you are, it's who you are.

In the modern Western world, perceptions of home are consistently colored by factors of economy and choice. There's an expectation in our society that you'll grow up, buy a house, get a mortgage, and jump through all the financial hoops that home ownership entails, explains Patrick Devine-Wright, a professor in human geography at the University of Exeter. And it's true that part of why my home feels like mine is because I'm the one paying for it, not my parents, not a college scholarship. "That kind of economic system is predicated on marketing people to live in a different home, or a better home than the one they're in," Devine-Wright says. The endless options can leave us constantly wondering if there isn't some place with better schools, a better neighborhood, more green space, and on and on. We may leave a pretty good thing behind, hoping that the next place will be even more desirable.

In some ways, this mobility has become part of the natural course of a life. The script is a familiar one: you move out of your parents' house, maybe go to college, get a place of your own, get a bigger house when you have kids, then a smaller one when the kids move out. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Even if we did stay in one place, it's unlikely we would ever have the same deep attachment to our environment as those from some South Asian communities do. It just doesn't fit with our culture.

But in spite of everything -- in spite of the mobility, the individualism, and the economy -- on some level we do recognize the importance of place. The first thing we ask someone when we meet them, after their name, is where they are from, or the much more interestingly-phrased "where's home for you?" We ask, not just to place a pushpin for them in our mental map of acquaintances, but because we recognize that the answer tells us something important about them. My answer for "where are you from?" is usually Michigan, but "where's home for you?" is a little harder.

If home is where the heart is, then by its most literal definition, my home is wherever I am. I've always been liberal in my use of the word. If I'm going to visit my parents, I'm going home and if I'm returning to Chicago, I'm also going home. My host parents' apartment in Paris was home while I lived there, as was my college dorm and my aunt's place on the Upper West Side, where I stayed during my internship. And the truth is, the location of your heart, as well as the rest of your body, does affect who you are. The differences may seem trivial (a new subculture means new friends, more open spaces make you want to go outside more), but they can lead to lifestyle changes that are significant.

Memories, too, are cued by the physical environment. When you visit a place you used to live, these cues can cause you to revert back to the person you were when you lived there. The rest of the time, different places are kept largely separated in our minds. The more connections our brain makes to something, the more likely our everyday thoughts are to lead us there. But connections made in one place can be isolated from those made in another, so we may not think as often about things that happened for the few months we lived someplace else. Looking back, many of my homes feel more like places borrowed than places possessed, and while I sometimes sift through mental souvenirs of my time there, in the scope of a lifetime, I was only a tourist.

I can't possibly live everywhere I once labeled home, but I can frame these places on my walls. My decorations can serve as a reminder of the more adventurous person I was in New York, the more carefree person I was in Paris, and the more ambitious person I was in Michigan. I can't be connected with my home in the intense way South Asians are in Sax's book, but neither do I presume my personality to be context-free. No one is ever free from their social or physical environment. And whether or not we are always aware of it, a home is a home because it blurs the line between the self and the surroundings, and challenges the line we try to draw between who we are and where we are.

Image: romakoma/ Shutterstock .

• Relationships

The Meaning of "Home"

Four approaches to studying "home" show how home affects our experiences..

Posted November 4, 2021 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• “Home” researchers might study environmental psychology, memory and attachment theory, a hierarchy of needs, and identity.
• Resources guide us toward different ways of thinking about, understanding, and developing notions of “home.”
• "Home" and "family" are not necessarily synonymous; nor are they always "happy".

When you ask yourself, “What does home mean to me?," how does your inner voice respond? Has your answer to the question changed as your life and circumstances have changed? Mine certainly has, as I recently described in an essay on my personal blog, "Love Is Real."

I wonder how many people remember learning to read and to print and then endlessly writing out their name, street address, town or city, state, perhaps a zip code (those did not exist when I was a child), country, continent, and then maybe “World,” possibly followed by “Universe.” What is this urge to situate ourselves in space, in a geographic location, especially one centered around our earliest memories of where we lived?

Four ways of looking at these questions ask if “home” is defined by the following:

• Environmental cues and their impact on our perception, cognition , emotions, behaviors, and relationships.
• A hierarchy of needs and the context in which the most basic of them are met.
• Emotional memories and fantasies along with their impact, including memory -driven attachment scripts that a person wants to implement or avoid.
• Our sense of identity and belonging, extending to and beyond group memberships.

But, first, before we dive into the topic, a caveat. In the spring of 1986 or 1987, the Whitney Museum of American Art branch in the Champion building in Stamford, Connecticut, offered the public a gripping look into the dark side of “home.” Noting that much media and many people associate home with positive experiences — often idealized ones — the curators chose to acknowledge that the reality often fails to match a desire or wish. Artists depicted homes plagued by violence, addiction , exploitation, chaos, and ill will.

These are the dwellings that easily produce traumatized children and eventually adults, those studied in Adverse Childhood Experiences research , who are at risk for developmental disruptions as well as emotional, cognitive, physical, and relationship problems. The consequences are tragic and many — see the list of resources curated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . “Home” is not necessarily a synonym for “happy place.”

4 Perspectives on Home

1. Environmental psychology . Research on person–environment relationships can include the study of spaces where people dwell. Environmental psychologists have documented qualities to which homes expose people, like noise levels, toxins, emotional climates, crowding (or its absence), and their impact on all aspects of experience, from the personal (biological, cognitive, emotional, behavioral) to the social. Organizational psychologists often use or adapt these methods and the literature to maximize an organization’s goals . Another branch, architectural psychology, focuses on the impact of design to amplify positive or minimize negative impact. Applications range from single-person dwellings to community institutions, from a treehouse to a hospital.

Around the world, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, people became interested in homes in new ways. They sought housing opportunities that would provide more inside space and greater access to the outdoors. Alternately, isolated living “pods” popped up, housing university students banished from their dorm, families educating small children, people yearning to be in a situation that included a “safe” community.

2. A hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs comes to mind as we examine what people who moved during the pandemic were searching for: greater attention to meeting survival needs for shelter, nutrition , hygiene, safety, work and play, and interpersonal needs for contact, communication, companionship, and belonging.

When social interaction changed dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, external sources of

spiritual and cultural nourishment decreased, and countless people, rather than searching for an alternative living arrangement like a different residence or a pod, turned their attention to their current homes, what they might potentially provide, and what they required in maintenance. Countless practical modifications were put in place. They expanded exponentially as the number of people in a living space grew. “Family” definitions broadened to include those related by blood, marriage , or choice, with “home” embracing those who lived together and intended to continue living together following the crisis, at least according to the American Red Cross.

3. Attachment and memory . A broader definition of “family” makes room for another aspect of “home,” that which sees home as the center for forging and nourishing human attachment bonds. "Home" includes primary locations where early memories and their emotions result in attachment scripts and their consequences. A sense of belonging securely or less so persists into adulthood or until changes in unconscious expectations make room for revised understanding. 1

Two more caveats: “Family” and “home” can be separate as well as associated, and they can be temporary. Long-distance relationships are currently flourishing; those in them dwell apart. And, as mentioned above, “family” can refer to people who live together by choice and are not related by legal or blood bonds, at least for many purposes. Therefore, attachment-oriented researchers often focus on the symbiotic relationships of those who cohabit by choice.

In contrast, scholars who study migration more broadly emphasize the “push” away from a current residence and “pull” toward a new one. Attachment to either "homeland" can be weak or fierce. Along these lines, researchers might investigate places in which basic cultural beliefs are imprinted along with the geography of the location. 2 In both cases, culture and a sense of belonging (or not) are absorbed systemically and often unconsciously, as suggested by Bronfenbrenner's theory of ecological development.

4. Identity and possible selves. From a personality perspective, we craft an identity from internal

experiences like temperament, needs, and desires, as well as through our relationships with others and with the larger social and cultural systems in which we are embedded. Our own imagination creates what Hazel Markus has labeled “ possible selves ,” imagery of who we might become. From this perspective, “home” is one context in which such creation can take place. It can become an expression of personal choices and aspirations as well as history.

In a different approach, family process psychologists often talk about ways in which people use or construct boundaries , connections, and communications. Space is both material and metaphor. It represents how a small group of related individuals expresses values and their implementation.

What has “home” been for you? Has its meaning changed during your adult life?

2021 Copyright Roni Beth Tower

1. Simpson, J. A. & Rholes, W. S. (Eds.) (1998). Attachment Theory and Close Relationships . New York: Guilford Press.

2. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1977). Space and Place. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Roni Beth Tower, PhD, a retired clinical, research and academic psychologist, earned a BA from Barnard (Religion), her PhD from Yale, and did postdoctoral work in epidemiology and public health at Yale Medical School.

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My Home Essay

500 words on my home essay.

A home is a place that gives comfort to everyone. It is because a home is filled with love and life. Much like every lucky person, I also have a home and a loving family. Through My Home Essay, I will take you through what my home is like and how much it means to me.

A Place I Call Home

My home is situated in the city. It is not too big nor too small, just the perfect size. My family lives in the home. It comprises of my father, mother, sister and grandparents. We live in our ancestral home so my home is very vintage.

It is very old but remains to be super strong. There are six rooms in my home. Each family member has a unique room which they have decorated as per their liking. For instance, my elder sister is a big fan of music, so her walls are filled with posters of musicians like BTS, RM, and more.

Our drawing room is a large one with a high ceiling. We still use the vintage sofa set which my grandmother got as a wedding gift. Similarly, there is a vintage TV and radio which she uses till date.

Adjoining the drawing room is my bedroom. It is my favourite room because it contains everything that I love. I have a pet guinea pig which lives in a cage in my room. We also have a storeroom which is filled with things we don’t use but also cannot discard.

Our lawn in front of the house has a little garden. In that garden , my mother is growing her own kitchen garden. She is passionate about it and brings different seeds every month to grow them out and use them in our food.

The fondest memories I have in a place is my terrace. Our terrace is huge with many plants. I remember all the good times we have spent there as a family. Moreover, we play there a lot when my cousins come over. Thus, every nook and corner of my home is special to me.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Appreciation Towards My Home

I know a lot of people who do not have homes or not as big as mine. It makes me more grateful and appreciates my home more. Not everyone gets the fortune to have a good home and a loving family, but luckily, I have been blessed with both.

I am thankful for my home because when I grow up, I can look back at the wonderful memories I made here. The walk down the memory lane will be a sweet one because of the safety and security my home has given me. It is indeed an ideal home.

Conclusion of My Home Essay

My home is important to me because for better or worse, it helps me belong. It makes me understand my place in time and connect with the world and the universe at large. Thus, I am grateful to have a place I can call home.

FAQ on My Home Essay

Question 1: What is the importance of a home?

Answer 1: Home offers us security, belonging and privacy in addition to other essential things. Most importantly, it gives us a place with a centring where we leave every morning and long to return every night .

Question 2: Why is home important to a family?

Answer 2: A home signifies a lot more than a house. It is because we find comfort in our home as it contains memories and a place where our bonds strengthen. It is where we get plenty of benefits.

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The Definition Essay

A definition essay should include, where to start, writing process.

A definition essay is one that explains a term, either by defining what it means or by clarifying which meaning is intended when a word has several meanings. For instance, a writer might need to define slicing to someone unfamiliar with golf or the term koi to someone unfamiliar with tropical fish. If the writer calls a friend a nonconformist, he or she might ask the writer for the definition of that word. A writer may disagree with his or her peers over the meaning of the word feminism even though they share similar politics. Clearly, definitions are an important party of daily communication. Definition Essays are meant to help the reader to see beyond the basic, dictionary definition of a word, that he or she might fully grasp the term or concept discussed.

It is useful to include a brief explanation, so readers can begin to grasp the concept. This includes the term itself, the class to which the term belongs, and the distinguishing characteristics that differentiate this item from all others in its class.

• Trypophobia is a medically recognized fear that is an aversion to the sight of irregular patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps.

This type of essay focuses on a specific term and discusses it in detail. In order to help readers better understand a term, the author may describe a philosophy behind a movement, the uses of a specific item, or the different types of a specific emotion.

• Trypophobia is based on a deep-seated disgust that most humans have toward certain plants and medical conditions that cause patterns of holes, but these emotions have been allowed to be taken to an extreme.

The thesis of an extended-definition essay tells why the term is worth reading about. Some writers choose to separate the brief definition from their thesis, so it is important to look for both parts while reading and to be sure to include them in the paper.

Narration, description, illustration, process analysis, comparison and contrast, classification and division, cause and effect, and argumentative styles are all used to develop definition essays. To explain a term, more than one pattern of development can be used. For example, if defining a home run, an author may include his or her favorite baseball player’s best jogs around the bases in a narrative style. But if defining a style of art, a descriptive style may be more appropriate.

When the term being defined is so similar to another term that it can be confused with it, a writer may use negation to explain how that term is different from the others. This involves telling what the term is NOT in addition to what it is.

• Trypophobia is not recognized as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. It is not believed to be a learned cultural fear.

Make sure you feel familiar with the topic or that it can be easily learned. Narrow this topic to a specific term. For example, instead of writing about the term celebrity, focus on a political or Hollywood celebrity type.

Brainstorm a list of words that describe the term, such as people or actions that may be examples of it. Try describing the object to a friend and write down the words used. Write down everything a person would need to know to understand it. Try observing a person associated with the term. Look up the definition and etymology in the dictionary. Think of situations that reveal the meaning or similar terms. Do a search for the term on the internet.

Look over the brainstormed list, and organize the ideas based on the pattern of development chosen. If using narration (refer to narration essay handout for more details), then organize the ideas in chronological order. If using characteristics, a most-to-least or least-to-most order (see the descriptive essay handout for clarification and other examples) may be best.

Describe the term as specifically as possible. If describing Dalmatians, do not simply say they are a breed of dog. Describe the colors, behaviors, history, and benefits of this breed. DO NOT include the term as part of the definition. Look up synonyms to use if a similar word is needed. Include enough distinguishing characteristics so that readers will not mistake the term for something else in its class. Do not limit the definition so much that it becomes inaccurate. Use multiple transitions, and consider including the etymology of the term.

After completing the writing phase of an essay, make sure to proofread and go over everything again. When rereading an essay, we can spot grammar errors and consider ways to improve writing. Aside from improving spelling, grammar, and punctuation, you can expand on and explain your ideas more effectively. This stage can be completed effectively by slowly reviewing your writing, looking for specific errors you may struggle with, and double-checking everything.

This paragraph presents the term, provides background information, and includes the thesis statement. This paragraph may also suggest the importance or value of understanding the term. It might be helpful to use negation, what it is and is not. The introduction should include a brief standard definition of the term as well as a perspective or point of view about the term. Here is a good thesis statement:

• The future of wireless cable, a method of transmitting television signals through the air using microwaves, is uncertain.

These 2-3 paragraphs will explain the term's class and present characteristics that distinguish the term from others in the class. These paragraphs can also introduce facts, examples, descriptions, and so forth to make the term understandable. It should be organized using one or more development patterns (narration, cause, and effect, illustration, etc.). Each paragraph should include sufficient information for readers to understand each characteristic.

This paragraph references the thesis and draws the essay to a close. It will also leave the reader with a final impression of the term.

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What is the meaning of home? Hint: It’s not just a place.

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

We have spent an unprecedented amount of time sheltering in place this year, which makes us wonder: What is the true meaning of home? Keep reading to hear from people from all walks of life.

If you’re reading this, you probably have a home as defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary – one’s place of residence; domicile; house. But there’s another kind of home, the one we at Schlage spend a lot of time helping you achieve. It’s the intangible feeling you get in a location, a sense of peace, joy from loved ones or an environment where everyone knows they’re welcome. “Home” isn’t easy to define, but you know when you’re there.

We have spent an unprecedented amount of time sheltering in place this year, which makes us wonder: What is the true meaning of home? Keep reading to hear from people from all walks of life – sages, celebrities and everyday people – on what home means to them.

Where we find comfort and safety

Feeling secure at home often goes beyond just having good deadbolts. It’s where we retreat when times are tough and where we depend on family and the familiar to restore our sense of peace.

“Home is where the heart can laugh without shyness. Home is where the heart’s tears can dry at their own pace.” – Vernon Baker , First Lieutenant in U.S. Army who earned the Purple Heart, Bronze Star and Distinguished Service Cross and is the only living Black WWII veteran to earn the Medal of Honor

“Home to me is where I feel safe, secure, loved and accepted. It's a place I don't have to define my strengths or explain my responses. Home is where I can be me 24/7, where I can be the champion or be insecure and still be cherished. Home to me is a place of refuge. Home is happy and full of laughter. Home is a place where the hugs abound and peace is found.” – Victoria Cowen, Corporate Compliance Manager at Allegion (parent company of Schlage)

“Home is the place where I go to feel safe and comfortable. If something negative happens, where do I retreat and regroup? It's not even my entire house, it is specifically my living room, kitchen, and bedroom; that is my 'home.' (The garage, bathrooms, den, and office don't feel like part of my home, they are just other places that happen to be adjacent to my home.) And if my house were to burn down, my home would be the next place in line that I go to in order to be safe: my bedroom in my childhood/parents' house.” – Matthew Stonebraker, Senior Mechanical Engineer at Allegion

“Home isn’t where you’re from, it’s where you find light when all grows dark.” – Pierce Brown, science fiction author

Where we are always welcome

No matter where life takes us, many of us see home as the place where we are always wanted. It is where we can be true to ourselves and others.

“I want my home to be that kind of place–a place of sustenance, a place of invitation, a place of welcome.” – Mary DeMuth, author and speaker

“I think that when you invite people to your home, you invite them to yourself.” – Oprah Winfrey

“May you always have walls for the winds, a roof for the rain, tea beside the fire, laughter to cheer you, those you love near you and all your heart may desire. May joy and peace surround you, contentment latch your door, and happiness be with you now and bless you evermore.” – Irish proverb

Where we put down our roots

Home is not static. It could be where we grew up, but it can just as easily be where we feel settled and begin a new life full of possibilities.

“Our homes are more than financial assets. They have deep emotional meaning. For those of us fortunate enough to have grown up in houses owned by our parents, they were the backdrop for our childhood memories — the places we played and argued and hung our artwork and marked the door jamb with pencil lines as we grew taller.” – Dr. Keith Ablow, Psych Central

“[T]here’s a big psychological difference between feeling at home and being home. Feeling at home on the Tiwi Islands or in Bangalore or Vancouver (if you are not native) is simply a way of saying that the not-home-ness of those places has diminished since you first arrived. Some people, as they move through their lives, rediscover home again and again. Some people never find another after once leaving home. And, of course, some people never leave the one home they’ve always known.” – Verlyn Klinkenborg, Smithsonian Magazine

“I think the house shows that I have true faith in myself to take on this task when I was just 27 and see it through … I also think the house says that I will forever remain solid in the place I was born.” – Rapper Drake in Architectural Digest talking about his 50,000-square-foot mansion in his hometown of Toronto

“For me, home is my physical space, yes. A place I feel comfortable and safe. My retreat. ‘Home’ is also where I've planted roots. It's my friends and my community. Fun fact, in my 41 years on Earth, I haven't lived anywhere as long as I've lived in Fishers (a suburb of Indianapolis), and in this particular house where we live. So, I would say, Fishers is my ‘home’ now. We have talked about moving but I would have a really hard time leaving.” – Lauren Young, HR Global Compensation Manager at Allegion

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” – Robert Frost, author

Where our dreams become reality

When we are safe at home, we are free to imagine the possibilities that lay ahead. It is where our future begins.

“Just like memories, home is also where your hopes and dreams are. Dreaming about when you grow up. Being a spaceman or a firefighter. Sinking beneath the sea as a scuba diver. I couldn’t imagine living without dreams. My home grounds them, and without a home, I wouldn’t have any.” – Wynn, Fifth grade. Read his full essay for Habitat for Humanity Canada

“Home means a future. Once we had a stable home, we could think beyond where we were going to live from week to week, and we could begin to look ahead to where we wanted to go. Home is the base where everything begins.” — Kelly for Habitat for Humanity

“Yes, your home is your castle, but it is also your identity and your possibility to be open to others.” – David Soul, actor

What does home mean to you? Share with us on Facebook , Twitter or Instagram .

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• How to Write a Definition Essay

A definition essay can be deceivingly difficult to write. This type of paper requires you to write a personal yet academic definition of one specific word. The definition must be thorough and lengthy. It is essential that you choose a word that will give you plenty to write about, and there are a few standard tactics you can use to elaborate on the term. Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when writing a definition essay.

Part 1 of 3: Choosing the Right Word

1: choose an abstract word with a complex meaning. [1].

A simple word that refers to a concrete word will not give you much to write about, but a complex word that refers to an abstract concept provides more material to explore.

• Typically, nouns that refer to a person, place, or thing are too simple for a definition essay. Nouns that refer to an idea work better, however, as do most adjectives.
• For example, the word “house” is fairly simple and an essay written around it may be dull. By switching to something slightly more abstract like “home,” however, you can play around with the definition more. A “home” is a concept, and there are many elements involved in the creation of a “home.” In comparison, a “house” is merely a structure.

2: Make sure that the word is disputable.

Aside from being complex, the word should also refer to something that can mean different things to different people.

• A definition essay is somewhat subjective by nature since it requires you to analyze and define a word from your own perspective. If the answer you come up with after analyzing a word is the same answer anyone else would come up with, your essay may appear to lack depth.

3: Choose a word you have some familiarity with.

Dictionary definitions can only tell you so much. Since you need to elaborate on the word you choose to define, you will need to have your own base of knowledge or experience with the concept you choose.

• For instance, if you have never heard the term “pedantic,” your understanding of the word will be limited. You can introduce yourself to the word for your essay, but without previous understanding of the concept, you will not know if the definition you describe is truly fitting.

4: Read the dictionary definition.

While you will not be relying completely on the dictionary definition for your essay, familiarizing yourself with the official definition will allow you to compare your own understanding of the concept with the simplest, most academic explanation of it.

• As an example, one definition of “friend” is “a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.” [2] Your own ideas or beliefs about what a “friend” really is likely include much more information, but this basic definition can present you with a good starting point in forming your own.

5:  Research the word’s origins.

Look up your chosen word in the Oxford English Dictionary or in another etymology dictionary. [3]

• These sources can tell you the history behind a word, which can provide further insight on a general definition as well as information about how a word came to mean what it means today.

Part 2 of 3: Potential Elements of an Effective Definition

1: write an analysis. [4].

Separate a word into various parts. Analyze and define each part in its own paragraph.

• You can separate “return” into “re-” and “turn.” The word “friendship” can be separated into “friend” and “ship.”
• In order to analyze each portion of a word, you will still need to use additional defining tactics like negation and classification.
• Note that this tactic only works for words that contain multiple parts. The word “love,” for instance, cannot be broken down any further. If defining “platonic love,” though, you could define both “platonic” and “love” separately within your essay.

2:  Classify the term.

Specify what classes and parts of speech a word belongs to according to a standard dictionary definition.

• While this information is very basic and dry, it can provide helpful context about the way that a given word is used.

3: Compare an unfamiliar term to something familiar.

An unfamiliar or uncommon concept can be explained using concepts that are more accessible to the average person.

• Many people have never heard of the term “confrere,” for instance. One basic definition is “a fellow member of a profession, fraternity, etc.” As such, you could compare “confrere” with “colleague,” which is a similar yet more familiar concept. [5]

4:  Provide traditional details about the term.

Explain any physical characteristics or traditional thoughts used to describe your term of choice.

• The term “home” is often visualized physically as a house or apartment. In more abstract terms, “home” is traditionally thought to be a warm, cozy, and safe environment. You can include all of these features in a definition essay on “home.”

5: Use examples to illustrate the meaning.

People often relate to stories and vivid images, so using a fitting story or image that relates to the term can be used in clarifying an abstract, formless concept.

• In a definition essay about “kindness,” for example, you could write about an act of kindness you recently witnessed. Someone who mows the lawn of an elderly neighbor is a valid example, just as someone who gave you an encouraging word when you were feeling down might be.

6: Use negation to explain what the term does not mean.

If a term is often misused or misunderstood, mentioning what it is not is an effective way to bring the concept into focus.

• A common example would be the term “courage.” The term is often associated with a lack of fear, but many will argue that “courage” is more accurately described as acting in spite of fear.

7: Provide background information.

This is when your research about the etymology of a word will come in handy. Explain where the term originated and how it came to mean what it currently means.

Part 3 of 3: Definition Essay Structure

1: introduce the standard definition..

You need to clearly state what your word is along with its traditional or dictionary definition in your introductory paragraph.

• By opening with the dictionary definition of your term, you create context and a basic level of knowledge about the word. This will allow you to introduce and elaborate on your own definition.
• This is especially significant when the traditional definition of your term varies from your own definition in notable ways.

2: Define the term in your own words in your thesis.

Your actual thesis statement should define the term in your own words.

• Keep the definition in your thesis brief and basic. You will elaborate on it more in the body of your paper.
• Avoid using passive phrases involving the word “is” when defining your term. The phrases “is where” and “is when” are especially clunky. [6]
• Do not repeat part of the defined term in your definition.

3:  Separate different parts of the definition into separate paragraphs.

Each tactic or method used to define your term should be explored in a separate paragraph.

• Note that you do not need to use all the possible methods of defining a term in your essay. You should use a variety of different methods in order to create a full, well-rounded picture of the term, but some tactics will work great with some terms but not with others.

4: Conclude with a summary of your main points.

Briefly summarize your main points around the start of your concluding paragraph.

• This summary does not need to be elaborate. Usually, looking at the topic sentence of each body paragraph is a good way to form a simple list of your main points.
• You can also draw the essay to a close by referring to phrases or images evoked in your introduction.

5: Mention how the definition has affected you, if desired.

If the term you define plays a part in your own life and experiences, your final concluding remarks are a good place to briefly mention the role it plays.

• Relate your experience with the term to the definition you created for it in your thesis. Avoid sharing experiences that relate to the term but contradict everything you wrote in your essay.

Sources and Citations

• http://www.roanestate.edu/owl/Definition.html
• http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/friend?s=t
• http://www.etymonline.com/
• http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/definition.html
• http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/confrere?s=t
• http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/definition.htm
• How to Write a Definition Essay. Provided by : WikiHow. Located at : http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Definition-Essay . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Table of Contents

Instructor Resources (Access Requires Login)

• Overview of Instructor Resources

An Overview of the Writing Process

• Introduction to the Writing Process
• Introduction to Writing
• Your Role as a Learner
• What is an Essay?
• Reading to Write
• Defining the Writing Process
• Videos: Prewriting Techniques
• Thesis Statements
• Organizing an Essay
• Creating Paragraphs
• Conclusions
• Editing and Proofreading
• Matters of Grammar, Mechanics, and Style
• Peer Review Checklist
• Comparative Chart of Writing Strategies

Using Sources

• Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Avoiding Plagiarism
• Formatting the Works Cited Page (MLA)
• Citing Paraphrases and Summaries (APA)
• APA Citation Style, 6th edition: General Style Guidelines

Definition Essay

• Definitional Argument Essay
• Critical Thinking
• Video: Thesis Explained
• Effective Thesis Statements
• Student Sample: Definition Essay

Narrative Essay

• Introduction to Narrative Essay
• Student Sample: Narrative Essay
• "Shooting an Elephant" by George Orwell
• "Sixty-nine Cents" by Gary Shteyngart
• Video: The Danger of a Single Story
• How to Write an Annotation
• How to Write a Summary
• Writing for Success: Narration

Illustration/Example Essay

• Introduction to Illustration/Example Essay
• "She's Your Basic L.O.L. in N.A.D" by Perri Klass
• "April & Paris" by David Sedaris
• Writing for Success: Illustration/Example
• Student Sample: Illustration/Example Essay

Compare/Contrast Essay

• Introduction to Compare/Contrast Essay
• "Disability" by Nancy Mairs
• "Friending, Ancient or Otherwise" by Alex Wright
• "A South African Storm" by Allison Howard
• Writing for Success: Compare/Contrast
• Student Sample: Compare/Contrast Essay

Cause-and-Effect Essay

• Introduction to Cause-and-Effect Essay
• "Cultural Baggage" by Barbara Ehrenreich
• "Women in Science" by K.C. Cole
• Writing for Success: Cause and Effect
• Student Sample: Cause-and-Effect Essay

Argument Essay

• Introduction to Argument Essay
• Rogerian Argument
• "The Case Against Torture," by Alisa Soloman
• "The Case for Torture" by Michael Levin
• How to Write a Summary by Paraphrasing Source Material
• Writing for Success: Argument
• Student Sample: Argument Essay
• Grammar/Mechanics Mini-lessons
• Mini-lesson: Subjects and Verbs, Irregular Verbs, Subject Verb Agreement
• Mini-lesson: Sentence Types
• Mini-lesson: Fragments I
• Mini-lesson: Run-ons and Comma Splices I
• Mini-lesson: Comma Usage
• Mini-lesson: Parallelism
• Mini-lesson: The Apostrophe
• Mini-lesson: Capital Letters
• Grammar Practice - Interactive Quizzes
• De Copia - Demonstration of the Variety of Language
• Style Exercise: Voice

• Biographical
• More from M-W
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Definition of home

 (Entry 1 of 4)

Definition of home  (Entry 2 of 4)

Definition of home  (Entry 3 of 4)

Definition of home  (Entry 4 of 4)

intransitive verb

transitive verb

• hearthstone

Examples of home in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'home.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Middle English hom, hoome "dwelling, building, one's native town or land," going back to Old English hām "landed property, estate, dwelling, house, inhabited place, native land," going back to Germanic *haima- "dwelling" (whence also Old Saxon & Old Frisian hēm "home, dwelling," Middle Dutch heem, heim "dwelling," Old High German heima "dwelling, homeland," Old Norse heimr "abode, land, this world," Gothic haims "village, countryside, [in compounds] home"), of uncertain origin

Note: A widely accepted etymology sees Germanic *haima- as going back to Indo-European *ḱoi-mo, an o-grade derivative, with a suffix *-mo-, of the verbal base *ḱei- "lie, be at rest." Also from *ḱoi-mo- would be an assumed Greek *koímē or *koîmos "bed," the source of the denominal derivative koimáō, koimân "to put to bed, lay to rest" (see cemetery ); further associated are Lithuanian šeimà "family, household members (including servants)," Latvian sàime, Russian Church Slavic sěmĭ "person," sěmija, translating Greek andrápoda "prisoners of war sold as slaves," sěminŭ "slave, household member," Russian sem'já "family," Ukrainian sim'já. (Lithuanian kiẽmas "farmstead, village" and káimas "village" are perhaps related, via a form with a centum outcome of ḱ, or as a loanword from Germanic.) According to an alternative hypothesis, Germanic *haima- goes back to Indo-European *tḱoi̯-mo-, a derivative with *-mo- from Indo-European *tḱei̯- "dwell, inhabit" (in a more traditional representation *ḱþei̯- ; see amphictyony ). Directly comparable would be Sanskrit kṣémaḥ "habitable," kṣémaḥ or -am (noun) "calm, quiet, safety," which within Sanskrit are direct derivatives from kṣéti "(s/he) dwells." The Baltic and Slavic forms cited above would then be attributable to this form.

Middle English hom, going back to Old English hām, probably from accusative of hām "dwelling, home entry 1 " (with parallel forms in other Germanic languages)

from attributive use of home entry 1

derivative of home entry 1

before the 12th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

before the 12th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

13th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

1802, in the meaning defined at transitive sense

Phrases Containing home

• a place to call home
• at home with
• away from home
• bring home the bacon
• broken home
• close to home
• come home to
• come home to roost
• detention home
• down - home
• drive one's point home
• eat one out of house and home
• foster home
• funeral home
• harvest home
• hearth and home
• hit / strike home
• home and dry
• home away from home
• home computer
• home - cooked
• home cooking
• home economics
• home equity loan
• home from home
• home - improvement
• home office
• home ownership
• home remedy
• home screen
• home - style
• home sweet home
• home theater
• home - wrecker
• in the comfort of one's own home
• live at home
• main / home office
• make oneself at home
• make one's home
• make someone feel (right) at home
• mobile home
• mobile home park
• nothing to write home about
• nursing home
• on someone's return home
• on the home front
• ram (something) home
• retirement home
• solo home run
• someone's return home
• starter home / house
• stately home
• stay - at - home
• summer home
• take - home pay
• the / his chickens are (finally) coming home to roost
• the home front
• till / until the cows come home
• vacation home
• work at / from home
• work outside the home

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Dictionary Entries Near home

Cite this entry.

“Home.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/home. Accessed 25 May. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of home.

Kids Definition of home  (Entry 2 of 4)

Kids Definition of home  (Entry 3 of 4)

Kids Definition of home  (Entry 4 of 4)

Middle English hom , from Old English hām "village, home"

Biographical Definition

Biographical name (1), definition of home.

 (Entry 1 of 2)

biographical name (2)

Definition of Home  (Entry 2 of 2)

More from Merriam-Webster on home

Nglish: Translation of home for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of home for Arabic Speakers

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What is an Essay?

10 May, 2020

11 minutes read

Author:  Tomas White

Well, beyond a jumble of words usually around 2,000 words or so - what is an essay, exactly? Whether you’re taking English, sociology, history, biology, art, or a speech class, it’s likely you’ll have to write an essay or two. So how is an essay different than a research paper or a review? Let’s find out!

Defining the Term – What is an Essay?

The essay is a written piece that is designed to present an idea, propose an argument, express the emotion or initiate debate. It is a tool that is used to present writer’s ideas in a non-fictional way. Multiple applications of this type of writing go way beyond, providing political manifestos and art criticism as well as personal observations and reflections of the author.

An essay can be as short as 500 words, it can also be 5000 words or more.  However, most essays fall somewhere around 1000 to 3000 words ; this word range provides the writer enough space to thoroughly develop an argument and work to convince the reader of the author’s perspective regarding a particular issue.  The topics of essays are boundless: they can range from the best form of government to the benefits of eating peppermint leaves daily. As a professional provider of custom writing, our service has helped thousands of customers to turn in essays in various forms and disciplines.

Origins of the Essay

Over the course of more than six centuries essays were used to question assumptions, argue trivial opinions and to initiate global discussions. Let’s have a closer look into historical progress and various applications of this literary phenomenon to find out exactly what it is.

Today’s modern word “essay” can trace its roots back to the French “essayer” which translates closely to mean “to attempt” .  This is an apt name for this writing form because the essay’s ultimate purpose is to attempt to convince the audience of something.  An essay’s topic can range broadly and include everything from the best of Shakespeare’s plays to the joys of April.

The essay comes in many shapes and sizes; it can focus on a personal experience or a purely academic exploration of a topic.  Essays are classified as a subjective writing form because while they include expository elements, they can rely on personal narratives to support the writer’s viewpoint.  The essay genre includes a diverse array of academic writings ranging from literary criticism to meditations on the natural world.  Most typically, the essay exists as a shorter writing form; essays are rarely the length of a novel.  However, several historic examples, such as John Locke’s seminal work “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” just shows that a well-organized essay can be as long as a novel.

The Essay in Literature

The essay enjoys a long and renowned history in literature.  They first began gaining in popularity in the early 16 th century, and their popularity has continued today both with original writers and ghost writers.  Many readers prefer this short form in which the writer seems to speak directly to the reader, presenting a particular claim and working to defend it through a variety of means.  Not sure if you’ve ever read a great essay? You wouldn’t believe how many pieces of literature are actually nothing less than essays, or evolved into more complex structures from the essay. Check out this list of literary favorites:

• The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon
• Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
• Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag
• High-Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now and Never by Barbara Kingsolver
• Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion
• Naked by David Sedaris
• Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau

Pretty much as long as writers have had something to say, they’ve created essays to communicate their viewpoint on pretty much any topic you can think of!

The Essay in Academics

Not only are students required to read a variety of essays during their academic education, but they will likely be required to write several different kinds of essays throughout their scholastic career.  Don’t love to write?  Then consider working with a ghost essay writer !  While all essays require an introduction, body paragraphs in support of the argumentative thesis statement, and a conclusion, academic essays can take several different formats in the way they approach a topic.  Common essays required in high school, college, and post-graduate classes include:

Five paragraph essay

This is the most common type of a formal essay. The type of paper that students are usually exposed to when they first hear about the concept of the essay itself. It follows easy outline structure – an opening introduction paragraph; three body paragraphs to expand the thesis; and conclusion to sum it up.

Argumentative essay

These essays are commonly assigned to explore a controversial issue.  The goal is to identify the major positions on either side and work to support the side the writer agrees with while refuting the opposing side’s potential arguments.

Compare and Contrast essay

This essay compares two items, such as two poems, and works to identify similarities and differences, discussing the strength and weaknesses of each.  This essay can focus on more than just two items, however.  The point of this essay is to reveal new connections the reader may not have considered previously.

Definition essay

This essay has a sole purpose – defining a term or a concept in as much detail as possible. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well, not quite. The most important part of the process is picking up the word. Before zooming it up under the microscope, make sure to choose something roomy so you can define it under multiple angles. The definition essay outline will reflect those angles and scopes.

Descriptive essay

Perhaps the most fun to write, this essay focuses on describing its subject using all five of the senses.  The writer aims to fully describe the topic; for example, a descriptive essay could aim to describe the ocean to someone who’s never seen it or the job of a teacher.  Descriptive essays rely heavily on detail and the paragraphs can be organized by sense.

Illustration essay

The purpose of this essay is to describe an idea, occasion or a concept with the help of clear and vocal examples. “Illustration” itself is handled in the body paragraphs section. Each of the statements, presented in the essay needs to be supported with several examples. Illustration essay helps the author to connect with his audience by breaking the barriers with real-life examples – clear and indisputable.

Informative Essay

Being one the basic essay types, the informative essay is as easy as it sounds from a technical standpoint. High school is where students usually encounter with informative essay first time. The purpose of this paper is to describe an idea, concept or any other abstract subject with the help of proper research and a generous amount of storytelling.

Narrative essay

This type of essay focuses on describing a certain event or experience, most often chronologically.  It could be a historic event or an ordinary day or month in a regular person’s life. Narrative essay proclaims a free approach to writing it, therefore it does not always require conventional attributes, like the outline. The narrative itself typically unfolds through a personal lens, and is thus considered to be a subjective form of writing.

Persuasive essay

The purpose of the persuasive essay is to provide the audience with a 360-view on the concept idea or certain topic – to persuade the reader to adopt a certain viewpoint. The viewpoints can range widely from why visiting the dentist is important to why dogs make the best pets to why blue is the best color.  Strong, persuasive language is a defining characteristic of this essay type.

The Essay in Art

Several other artistic mediums have adopted the essay as a means of communicating with their audience.  In the visual arts, such as painting or sculpting, the rough sketches of the final product are sometimes deemed essays.  Likewise, directors may opt to create a film essay which is similar to a documentary in that it offers a personal reflection on a relevant issue.  Finally, photographers often create photographic essays in which they use a series of photographs to tell a story, similar to a narrative or a descriptive essay.

Drawing the line – question answered

“What is an Essay?” is quite a polarizing question. On one hand, it can easily be answered in a couple of words. On the other, it is surely the most profound and self-established type of content there ever was. Going back through the history of the last five-six centuries helps us understand where did it come from and how it is being applied ever since.

If you must write an essay, follow these five important steps to works towards earning the “A” you want:

• Understand and review the kind of essay you must write
• Brainstorm your argument
• Find research from reliable sources to support your perspective
• Cite all sources parenthetically within the paper and on the Works Cited page
• Follow all grammatical rules

Generally speaking, when you must write any type of essay, start sooner rather than later!  Don’t procrastinate – give yourself time to develop your perspective and work on crafting a unique and original approach to the topic.  Remember: it’s always a good idea to have another set of eyes (or three) look over your essay before handing in the final draft to your teacher or professor.  Don’t trust your fellow classmates?  Consider hiring an editor or a ghostwriter to help out!

If you are still unsure on whether you can cope with your task – you are in the right place to get help. HandMadeWriting is the perfect answer to the question “Who can write my essay?”

A life lesson in Romeo and Juliet taught by death

Due to human nature, we draw conclusions only when life gives us a lesson since the experience of others is not so effective and powerful. Therefore, when analyzing and sorting out common problems we face, we may trace a parallel with well-known book characters or real historical figures. Moreover, we often compare our situations with […]

Ethical Research Paper Topics

Writing a research paper on ethics is not an easy task, especially if you do not possess excellent writing skills and do not like to contemplate controversial questions. But an ethics course is obligatory in all higher education institutions, and students have to look for a way out and be creative. When you find an […]

Art Research Paper Topics

Students obtaining degrees in fine art and art & design programs most commonly need to write a paper on art topics. However, this subject is becoming more popular in educational institutions for expanding students’ horizons. Thus, both groups of receivers of education: those who are into arts and those who only get acquainted with art […]

What Is a Capstone Project vs. Thesis

As students near the end of their academic journey, they encounter a crucial project called the capstone – a culmination of all they've learned. But what exactly is a capstone project? 

This article aims to demystify capstone projects, explaining what they are, why they matter, and what you can expect when you embark on this final academic endeavor.

Capstone Project Meaning

A capstone project is a comprehensive, culminating academic endeavor undertaken by students typically in their final year of study. 

It synthesizes their learning experiences, requiring students to apply the knowledge, skills, and competencies gained throughout their academic journey. A capstone project aims to address a real-world problem or explore a topic of interest in depth. 

As interdisciplinary papers, capstone projects encourage critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity. They allow students to showcase their mastery of their field of study and demonstrate their readiness for future academic or professional pursuits.

Now that we’ve defined what is a capstone project, let’s discuss its importance in the academic landscape. In case you have short-form compositions to handle, simply say, ‘ do my essay for me ,’ and our writers will take care of your workload.

Why Is a Capstone Project Important

A capstone project is crucial because it allows students to combine everything they've learned in school and apply it to real-life situations or big problems. 

It's like the ultimate test of what they know and can do. By working on these projects, students get hands-on experience, learn to think critically and figure out how to solve tough problems. 

Plus, it's a chance to show off their skills and prove they're ready for whatever comes next, whether that's starting a career or going on to more schooling.

Never Written Capstones Before?

Professional writers across dozens of subjects can help you right now.

What Is the Purpose of a Capstone Project

Here are three key purposes of a capstone project:

Integration of Knowledge and Skills

Capstones often require students to draw upon the knowledge and skills they have acquired throughout their academic program. The importance of capstone project lies in helping students synthesize what they have learned and apply it to a real-world problem or project. 

This integration helps students demonstrate their proficiency and readiness for graduation or entry into their chosen profession.

Culmination of Learning

Capstone projects culminate a student's academic journey, allowing them to apply theoretical knowledge to real-world scenarios. 

tackling a significant project or problem, students demonstrate their understanding of concepts and their ability to translate them into practical solutions, reinforcing their learning journey.

Professional Development

Capstone projects allow students to develop skills relevant to their future careers. These projects can also be tangible examples of their capabilities to potential employers or graduate programs.

Whether it's conducting research, presenting findings, or collaborating with peers, students gain valuable experience that enhances their professional readiness. 

Types of Capstone Projects

Capstones vary widely depending on the academic discipline, institution, and specific program requirements. Here are some common types:

What Is the Difference Between a Thesis and a Capstone Project

Here's a breakdown of the key differences between a thesis and a capstone project:

How to Write a Capstone Project

Let's dive into the specifics with actionable and meaningful steps for writing a capstone project:

1. Select a Pertinent Topic

Identify a topic that aligns with your academic interests, program requirements, and real-world relevance. Consider issues or challenges within your field that merit further exploration or solution. 

Conduct thorough research to ensure the topic is both feasible and significant. Here are some brilliant capstone ideas for your inspiration.

2. Define Clear Objectives

Clearly articulate the objectives of your capstone project. What specific outcomes do you aim to achieve? 

Whether it's solving a problem, answering a research question, or developing a product, ensure your objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).

3. Conduct Comprehensive Research

Dive deep into existing literature, theories, and empirical evidence related to your chosen topic. Identify gaps, controversies, or areas for further investigation. 

Synthesize relevant findings and insights to inform the development of your project and provide a solid foundation for your analysis or implementation.

4. Develop a Structured Plan

What is a capstone project in college without a rigid structure? Outline a comprehensive plan for your capstone project, including key milestones, tasks, and deadlines. 

Break down the project into manageable phases, such as literature review, data collection, analysis, and presentation. Establish clear criteria for success and regularly monitor progress to stay on track.

5. Implement Methodological Rigor

If your project involves research, ensure methodological rigor by selecting appropriate research methods, tools, and techniques. 

Develop a detailed research design or project plan that addresses key methodological considerations, such as sampling, data collection, analysis, and validity. Adhere to ethical guidelines and best practices throughout the research process.

6. Analyze and Interpret Findings

Analyze your data or findings using appropriate analytical techniques and tools. Interpret the results in relation to your research questions or objectives, highlighting key patterns, trends, or insights. 

Critically evaluate the significance and implications of your findings within the broader context of your field or industry.

7. Communicate Effectively

Present your capstone project clearly, concisely, and compellingly. Whether it's a written report, presentation, or multimedia deliverable, tailor your communication style to your target audience. Clearly articulate your research questions, methodology, findings, and conclusions. 

Use visuals, examples, and real-world applications to enhance understanding and engagement. Be prepared to defend your project and answer questions from peers, faculty, or stakeholders.

In wrapping up, what is a capstone project? It’s like the grand finale of your academic journey, where all the knowledge and skills you've acquired come together in one big project. 

It's not just about passing a test or getting a grade – it's about proving you've got what it takes to make a real difference in the world. So, if you ever need capstone project help , our writers will gladly lend you a hand in no time.

Due Date Is Just Around the Corner?

Streamline the writing progress with our expert service!

What Is a Capstone Project in College?

How to do a capstone project, how long does a capstone project take to complete.

Annie Lambert

specializes in creating authoritative content on marketing, business, and finance, with a versatile ability to handle any essay type and dissertations. With a Master’s degree in Business Administration and a passion for social issues, her writing not only educates but also inspires action. On EssayPro blog, Annie delivers detailed guides and thought-provoking discussions on pressing economic and social topics. When not writing, she’s a guest speaker at various business seminars.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

• T. (2023, June 16). What Is a Capstone Project? National University. https://www.nu.edu/blog/what-is-a-capstone-project/
• Lukins, S. (2024, May 12). What is a capstone project? And why is it important? Top Universities. https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/careers-advice-articles/what-capstone-project-why-it-important
• Capstone Project vs. Thesis: What’s the Difference? (2021, December 9). UAGC. https://www.uagc.edu/blog/capstone-project-vs-thesis-whats-difference

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About Political Wire

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC .

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As antisemitism grows, it is easier to condemn than define

Kobie Talmoud, 16, left, a student at John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Md., speaks with Karla Silvestre, President of the Montgomery Count (Md.) Board of Education, after a congressional hearing on antisemitism in K-12 public schools. Jacquelyn Martin/AP hide caption

Kobie Talmoud, 16, left, a student at John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Md., speaks with Karla Silvestre, President of the Montgomery Count (Md.) Board of Education, after a congressional hearing on antisemitism in K-12 public schools.

To some, the marked rise of antisemitism in the U.S. over the last few years has been shocking.

But for journalist Julia Ioffe, it's been unsurprising, and a reminder of the long history of persecution of Jews around the world.

"We were second class citizens," Ioffe says, recalling her childhood in the Soviet Union.

"We were excluded from universities, from jobs, from overseas travel, where we were called names by our teachers and just random passersby on the street."

She says the relative safety of Jews in the U.S. over the last few generations has been an exception to the larger scope of history.

Franklin Foer of The Atlantic shares that sentiment. His latest piece is titled, " The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending ."

"Like many American Jews, I once considered antisemitism a threat largely emanating from the right," he wrote.

One of the most vivid examples was in 2017, when white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, "Jews will not replace us." That year, Jewish cemeteries were vandalized. There were bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers.

Then, in 2018, a man walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh during Shabbat services and killed 11 people.

"'In every generation, somebody rises up to kill us.' That's what we say in the Seder," Ioffe says.

That context helps explain why there is now so much debate over demonstrations in support of Palestinians – a debate over how to define antisemitism, and what to do about it.

You're reading the Consider This newsletter, which unpacks one major news story each day. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox, and listen to more from the Consider This podcast .

Politics and antisemitism

Democrats and Republicans both say they want to fight antisemitism, but that might be where the agreement ends.

House Republicans have held hearings into antisemitism in schools, and the House voted on a bill that would adopt a legal definition of antisemitism to enforce civil rights laws at schools. President Biden also gave a major speech on the topic.

To Foer, the fact that politicians are even talking about antisemitism is important. "But on the other hand," he says, "it inevitably becomes a hugely polarized thing, and you have Republicans in Congress trying to score political points."

Large majorities of Americans say antisemitism is a serious problem

Ioffe similarly sees many of those efforts as disingenuous. She describes the political back and forth over antisemitism as "cynical opportunism."

"To me, one of the things that's...most dangerous for Jews is when we become a political football where both our needs, our safety, our humanness is completely erased," she says.

Anti-Zionism vs. antisemitism

Amid demonstrations in support of Palestinians, many are now grappling with the question of when, or if, anti-Zionism is antisemitic.

"You can absolutely be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic," Ioffe says. "One of the main ways that you do that is by being Jewish."

She says people who are rightly "incensed and horrified" by the humanitarian crisis in Gaza can have noble intentions, but blunder into antisemitic territory when talking about anti-Zionism.

"Then you get into questions of double standards," she says. "If the Palestinians have a right to national self-determination, do the Jews not have that? And if so, why not?"

Campus protests over the Gaza war

House passes bill aimed to combat antisemitism amid college unrest.

Foer agrees that it's complicated.

"There's a whole range of people who I know who are anti-Zionist," Foer says.

"[anti-Zionism is] not something I agree with...but I don't think that they are, per se, antisemites."

But there is a line. To Foer, when people use the word Zionist, it's often a synonym for Jew. "It becomes a way of expressing thoughts about Jewish villainy, about Jewish control, about a Jewish cabal that would be socially unacceptable," he says.

Listen to the full episode of Consider This, where host Ari Shapiro takes a close look at antisemitism with Julia Ioffe and Franklin Foer.

This episode was produced by Connor Donevan. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

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3.2: How to Write a Definition Essay

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A definition essay can be deceivingly difficult to write. This type of paper requires you to write a personal yet academic definition of one specific word. The definition must be thorough and lengthy. It is essential that you choose a word that will give you plenty to write about, and there are a few standard tactics you can use to elaborate on the term. Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when writing a definition essay.

Part 1 of 3: Choosing the Right Word

1: choose an abstract word with a complex meaning. [1].

A simple word that refers to a concrete word will not give you much to write about, but a complex word that refers to an abstract concept provides more material to explore.

• Typically, nouns that refer to a person, place, or thing are too simple for a definition essay. Nouns that refer to an idea work better, however, as do most adjectives.
• For example, the word “house” is fairly simple and an essay written around it may be dull. By switching to something slightly more abstract like “home,” however, you can play around with the definition more. A “home” is a concept, and there are many elements involved in the creation of a “home.” In comparison, a “house” is merely a structure.

2: Make sure that the word is disputable.

Aside from being complex, the word should also refer to something that can mean different things to different people.

• A definition essay is somewhat subjective by nature since it requires you to analyze and define a word from your own perspective. If the answer you come up with after analyzing a word is the same answer anyone else would come up with, your essay may appear to lack depth.

3: Choose a word you have some familiarity with.

Dictionary definitions can only tell you so much. Since you need to elaborate on the word you choose to define, you will need to have your own base of knowledge or experience with the concept you choose.

• For instance, if you have never heard the term “pedantic,” your understanding of the word will be limited. You can introduce yourself to the word for your essay, but without previous understanding of the concept, you will not know if the definition you describe is truly fitting.

4: Read the dictionary definition.

While you will not be relying completely on the dictionary definition for your essay, familiarizing yourself with the official definition will allow you to compare your own understanding of the concept with the simplest, most academic explanation of it.

• As an example, one definition of “friend” is “a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.” [2] Your own ideas or beliefs about what a “friend” really is likely include much more information, but this basic definition can present you with a good starting point in forming your own.

5: Research the word’s origins.

Look up your chosen word in the Oxford English Dictionary or in another etymology dictionary. [3]

• These sources can tell you the history behind a word, which can provide further insight on a general definition as well as information about how a word came to mean what it means today.

Part 2 of 3: Potential Elements of an Effective Definition

1: write an analysis. [4].

Separate a word into various parts. Analyze and define each part in its own paragraph.

• You can separate “return” into “re-” and “turn.” The word “friendship” can be separated into “friend” and “ship.”
• In order to analyze each portion of a word, you will still need to use additional defining tactics like negation and classification.
• Note that this tactic only works for words that contain multiple parts. The word “love,” for instance, cannot be broken down any further. If defining “platonic love,” though, you could define both “platonic” and “love” separately within your essay.

2: Classify the term.

Specify what classes and parts of speech a word belongs to according to a standard dictionary definition.

• While this information is very basic and dry, it can provide helpful context about the way that a given word is used.

3: Compare an unfamiliar term to something familiar.

An unfamiliar or uncommon concept can be explained using concepts that are more accessible to the average person.

• Many people have never heard of the term “confrere,” for instance. One basic definition is “a fellow member of a profession, fraternity, etc.” As such, you could compare “confrere” with “colleague,” which is a similar yet more familiar concept. [5]

4: Provide traditional details about the term.

Explain any physical characteristics or traditional thoughts used to describe your term of choice.

• The term “home” is often visualized physically as a house or apartment. In more abstract terms, “home” is traditionally thought to be a warm, cozy, and safe environment. You can include all of these features in a definition essay on “home.”

5: Use examples to illustrate the meaning.

People often relate to stories and vivid images, so using a fitting story or image that relates to the term can be used in clarifying an abstract, formless concept.

• In a definition essay about “kindness,” for example, you could write about an act of kindness you recently witnessed. Someone who mows the lawn of an elderly neighbor is a valid example, just as someone who gave you an encouraging word when you were feeling down might be.

6: Use negation to explain what the term does not mean.

If a term is often misused or misunderstood, mentioning what it is not is an effective way to bring the concept into focus.

• A common example would be the term “courage.” The term is often associated with a lack of fear, but many will argue that “courage” is more accurately described as acting in spite of fear.

7: Provide background information.

This is when your research about the etymology of a word will come in handy. Explain where the term originated and how it came to mean what it currently means.

Part 3 of 3: Definition Essay Structure

1: introduce the standard definition..

You need to clearly state what your word is along with its traditional or dictionary definition in your introductory paragraph.

• By opening with the dictionary definition of your term, you create context and a basic level of knowledge about the word. This will allow you to introduce and elaborate on your own definition.
• This is especially significant when the traditional definition of your term varies from your own definition in notable ways.

2: Define the term in your own words in your thesis.

Your actual thesis statement should define the term in your own words.

• Keep the definition in your thesis brief and basic. You will elaborate on it more in the body of your paper.
• Avoid using passive phrases involving the word “is” when defining your term. The phrases “is where” and “is when” are especially clunky. [6]
• Do not repeat part of the defined term in your definition.

3: Separate different parts of the definition into separate paragraphs.

Each tactic or method used to define your term should be explored in a separate paragraph.

• Note that you do not need to use all the possible methods of defining a term in your essay. You should use a variety of different methods in order to create a full, well-rounded picture of the term, but some tactics will work great with some terms but not with others.

4: Conclude with a summary of your main points.

Briefly summarize your main points around the start of your concluding paragraph.

• This summary does not need to be elaborate. Usually, looking at the topic sentence of each body paragraph is a good way to form a simple list of your main points.
• You can also draw the essay to a close by referring to phrases or images evoked in your introduction.

5: Mention how the definition has affected you, if desired.

If the term you define plays a part in your own life and experiences, your final concluding remarks are a good place to briefly mention the role it plays.

• Relate your experience with the term to the definition you created for it in your thesis. Avoid sharing experiences that relate to the term but contradict everything you wrote in your essay.

Sources and Citations

• www.roanestate.edu/owl/Definition.html
• http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/friend?s=t
• http://www.etymonline.com/
• http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/definition.html
• http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/confrere?s=t
• http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/definition.htm

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Foster Care and Child Welfare

Readers discuss a guest essay about removing children from troubled homes.

To the Editor:

Re “ To Protect Kids, We Need More Foster Care, Not Less ,” by Naomi Schaefer Riley (Opinion guest essay, May 13):

Pieces like this express concern about the well-being of children while ignoring the daily harms caused by family separation. The trauma of being ripped away from their parents and placed in the foster system with strangers often results in children developing a host of challenges, including poor mental and physical health, low educational achievement, high rates of homelessness and early pregnancy, and involvement in criminal activities.

The overreliance on family separation for children who aren’t in any immediate danger destroys families who could have remained together with the right support. The parents we work with every day love their children, but they often lack access to vital resources like secure housing, child care, nutritious food, mental health care and transportation.

In New York, allegations of neglect — many times because of a lack of resources — account for the vast majority of complaints against parents. We know that Black and brown families are especially vulnerable to being separated during invasive and coercive investigations.

Rather than overfunding punitive systems that do more harm than good, we must invest in the health and stability of vulnerable families.

Tehra Coles New York The writer is executive director of the Center for Family Representation.

This essay cogently highlights the well-intentioned but often dangerous trend of keeping children in risky settings. Unfortunately, it’s not only keeping children out of foster care; it’s also how many child welfare officials now approach adoption — seeking to have children be with their birth family, even when it is unsafe or when reunification efforts have failed for years.

In 1997 Congress sought to solve the problem of children lingering in foster care by passing the Adoption and Safe Families Act to limit how long children spent in the child welfare system before initiating the adoption process. Shortly after the bipartisan law was passed, timelines for children in foster care significantly decreased. Now, this law is largely ignored .

The most recent child welfare data show that 20 percent of the nearly 370,000 children in foster care have been in the system for three or more years, which means children spending more time without the love of an adoptive family.

Ryan Hanlon Alexandria, Va. The writer is president of the National Council for Adoption.

I have worked in the child welfare system as an attorney representing foster youth in the Bay Area for 18 years. The greatest flaw of the system, in my view, is the child welfare agency’s failure to identify family or family friends immediately upon removal of a child from their parent(s), so the child can safely remain in the care of someone they know, whether temporarily or longer term.

The act of removing a child from their parent(s) and placing them in a foster home with “strangers” has documented and obvious damaging consequences to a child’s emotional, physical and psychological health. The time that child welfare agencies often take to identify, contact and clear a relative or family friend for placement is problematic. More emphasis and resources must be devoted to this stage of the case.

A society that unequivocally cares about children would eliminate barriers that child welfare agencies create to circumvent and delay placing a child who they determine must be removed from parental care with a familiar face. Those of us working in this field witness the traumatic impact of this flawed system on children and families daily.

Vicki Trapalis San Francisco

Naomi Schaefer Riley attributes children’s deaths to efforts by child welfare agencies to keep at-risk families together. However, she fails to account for the many cities and states where significant reductions in children entering foster care have not led to any uptick in child maltreatment fatalities, such as New York City, Texas and New Jersey.

Data shows that the two trends described — efforts to reduce family separation and increased fatalities — are not happening in the same places. Texas, for instance, has recently reduced both foster care placement and fatalities, while both have increased in Georgia.

Research published in the Children and Youth Services Review shows that horrific child fatalities like Phoenix Castro’s, cited by Ms. Riley, represent “extreme outliers,” and that sensationalized media coverage leads to “foster care panics,” when child welfare agencies make politically conservative decisions that separate families unnecessarily, traumatizing children.

It’s important that we understand the facts about these tragic but rare deaths and the policies that actually protect children.

Nora McCarthy New York The writer is the director of the NYC Family Policy Project, a think tank.

The author uses the age-old tactic of highlighting an outlier case where a child tragically dies in the care of their parent as justification for erring on the side of caution and removing children from their families.

The reality is that unlike the horror stories that are portrayed in the media, physical and sexual abuse accounted for only 17 percent of the children that were removed from their parents last year. Most removals are due to “neglect,” a nebulous and vague term because poverty is often conflated with neglect.

And for those children who are placed in foster care, safety is far from guaranteed. One study found that children in foster care were 42 percent more likely to die than those in the general population. Multiple studies show that foster children experience physical and sexual abuse at higher rates than the general population. Many children have died in foster care.

Our society continues to perpetuate the well-debunked myth that foster care ensures that children will live better lives. As Naomi Schaefer Riley admits, “Foster care is not a panacea.” That’s the one thing we can agree upon.

Shanta Trivedi Baltimore The writer is faculty director of the Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Families, Children and the Courts and an assistant professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law.

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3 Home Design Trends That Will Define Summer 2024, According to Pinterest

These trends are all about embracing a home design style that feels unique to you.

Amy Bartlam

If you're planning to give your home a refresh this summer, Pinterest has you covered. Its 2024 summer trend report predicts the interior design trends you'll see everywhere this season. But that doesn't mean you need to go out and buy all new furnishings and décor—the top trends show that people are embracing aesthetics that feel both curated and eclectic, so you can tailor each to your own unique personality. We're diving into the home décor trends that Pinterest predicts will define the season, and each one gives you the opportunity to make it your own.

Dopamine Décor

Taran Wilkhu

Dopamine décor is all about infusing your home with pieces that make you happy. The opposite of neutral gray and beige interiors, this aesthetic encourages homeowners to mix bold colors and textures in a complementary way.

According to Pinterest, searches for dopamine décor have increased by 280 percent, as more people yearn to fill their homes with character. Searches related to dopamine décor, like whimsical décor (4,690 percent), grandma core bedroom (2,605 percent), color drenching (990 percent), and pastel eclectic décor (130 percent) are also up dramatically.

Romcom Décor

Daniel Hurst

If you want your home to feel cozy and curated, the rom-com décor trend is perfect for you. As the name implies, this aesthetic draws inspiration from the settings seen in romantic comedies, specifically Nancy Meyers movies. This trend uses soft hues, subtle floral prints, cozy lighting, and vintage touches to create a vibe that is charming and welcoming.

Expect to see this trend everywhere during summer 2024. According to Pinterest's report, searches related to all things Nancy Meyers, including living rooms, bedrooms, homes, and kitchens, are up significantly year over year.

Eclectic Vintage

Nathan Schroder

Eclectic décor really gives you the opportunity to infuse your space with personality. While it can mean many different things, at its core, this aesthetic is all about unpredictability. If you love '80s style décor but appreciate the sleekness of modern furniture—go ahead and combine the two to create a look that is uniquely you. There are no rules when creating an eclectic home.

According to Pinterest, more and more people are making eclectic décor choices that reflect their individuality and they're sourcing many of these pieces secondhand . In lieu of this, searches for things like vintage eclectic home, vintage plates on wall, vintage dinnerware, and vintage Americana have increased across the board.

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