Hoose

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A Scottish dialect form of the word house, meaning a building for dwelling in ; a verminous lung infection that causes coughing in young cattle and sheep
2. The Scots word for a dwelling or building people live in ; a parasitic lungworm disease that makes livestock, especially calves, cough persistently
3. A northern British variant of the word for a residence ; a respiratory condition in farm animals caused by lungworm parasites and marked by a husky cough

Etymology: Scots "hoose" is simply the Scottish way of writing "house," and it preserves a sound that English moved away from. The vowel in Old English "hūs" was a long "oo" sound, the same vowel found in "moon" and "food." Over the centuries, English shifted that vowel toward the diphthong we now hear in "house," while Scots kept closer to the older pronunciation, which is why the spelling "hoose" tracks the sound more faithfully than the standard form does. The root goes back to Proto-Germanic "*hūsą," a word meaning simply "house," shared by the Germanic languages that developed in northern Europe. Its Old English form "hūs" meant "dwelling, shelter, house," a sense that has barely changed in more than a thousand years. The Scots variant is a dialectal spelling of the same word, so a Scottish "hoose" and an English "house" are two faces of one inheritance rather than a borrowing between them.