# homeland

Pronunciation: say "HOHM-land" US /ˈhoʊmˌlænd/, UK /ˈhəʊmˌlænd/

## Noun

1. The country with which a person identifies as their own home.
   - Simple: The country someone thinks of as their home.
   - _Exiles often write longingly about the homeland they were forced to leave behind._
   - _Though raised overseas, she always spoke of Greece as her true homeland._
2. The country in which a person was born.
   - Simple: The country where someone was born.
   - _On the form she listed Vietnam, the homeland she had left as an infant._
   - _He returned to his homeland for the first time since being born there decades earlier._
3. The country in which a person currently lives.
   - Simple: The country where someone lives.
   - _Officials recorded each migrant's homeland as the nation where they had legally settled._
   - _Long-term residents often come to treat their adopted country as a second homeland._
4. The territory traditionally occupied by a particular ethnic group.
   - Simple: The land that an ethnic group has lived in for a very long time.
   - _The Kurdish homeland spans parts of several modern nation-states across the region._
   - _Many tribes were driven from their ancestral homeland by colonial expansion._
5. Under apartheid, a territory set aside for Black South Africans by the South African government. *(South Africa)*
   - Simple: An area that South Africa's government once set aside only for black people under apartheid.
   - _The government resettled millions of people into the homelands during the 1970s._
   - _Workers commuted enormous distances because their homeland lay far from the mines._

## Origin

A compound of home and land.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/homeland (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).