Tofts

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Plots of land on which a house and its outbuildings once stood, especially in medieval English villages
2. Small homestead sites, each holding a dwelling with its adjoining yard and buildings, often found in old rural settlements
3. Historic house plots with their surrounding ground, marking the sites where farmhouses and their outbuildings were formerly built

Etymology: "Tofts" is the plural of "toft," a word for a homestead: a small piece of land with a house and its buildings, often held by a farming household. The plural is what the word takes in most of its surviving uses, since the word is mainly found in place names and in the records of land holdings, where several plots sit side by side. The word came into English from Old Norse "toft," which goes back to a Proto-Germanic form meaning a site where a building stands. That older root is related to the idea of building, so the word's first sense was the ground a house was raised on rather than the house itself. Old Norse speakers who settled northern England and Scotland brought it with them, and it survives in English place names across those regions, where it marks the old homestead sites.

Synonyms: homestead, croft