Heorth

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The stone or brick floor of a fireplace where a fire is built ; the warm domestic center of a house and family life
2. The paved base beneath a fire in a fireplace ; the home and family life that a household shares
3. The fireside floor where flames are kindled in a room ; a household's domestic sphere and sense of home

Etymology: Heorth is the Old English word for the hearth, the stone or earthen floor on which a household's fire was built. Its sense was physical and domestic before it ever meant the family's home or a symbolic center of it. Old English "heorth" is inherited from a Germanic root shared with German "Herd" (stove, cooker), and Dutch "haard" and Old Norse "hǫrðr" still carry the same core meaning of a fireplace or hearth-base. The word was used in Old English poetry and prose much as the English hearth is today, for the fire at the center of a dwelling and the household gathered around it. Because a hearth was where a family ate, slept, and sheltered together, the word came to stand for home and domestic life itself, a shift that is visible in the way the word appears in texts describing a lord's hall. The modern spelling "hearth" took shape in Middle English, when the vowel changed and the initial "h" and the "ea" spelling settled into the form used today. The word has stayed close to its original fire-and-floor meaning, which is why it still sounds domestic.

Synonyms: hearth, fireplace