homeless

Pluralhomelesses

1. 1
   adjective

   Without a fixed, permanent place to live or stay.

   The flood left hundreds of residents homeless overnight.

   Volunteers handed out warm meals to homeless families downtown.

   Similarunhoused, houseless, roofless

   Oppositehoused, settled, sheltered

   Note

   A plain compound that goes back to Old English hāmlēas, home plus -less, with close cousins in Dutch heemloos, Danish hjemløs and Swedish hemlös. It works before a noun (homeless people, a homeless couple) and after a verb like leave, as when millions of peasants were left homeless by floods. It does not take degrees: nobody is described as more homeless than someone else.

2. 2
   adjective

   Containing no place that could be called home.

   The poem evokes a bleak, homeless landscape stripped of all comfort.

   Refugees crossed a homeless expanse of ruins where nothing felt like shelter.

   Similardesolate, barren, inhospitable, forlorn

   Oppositewelcoming, hospitable, cozy

   Note

   Here the word turns from people to places: a sea, a landscape, an expanse that offers nowhere to belong. Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) hears "the moanings of the homeless sea," and the sense fits that kind of literary writing. It describes the place itself, not anyone in it. A homeless sea is one where no home could be made, not one whose residents have lost theirs.

3. 3
   nounnonstandardoffensivecountable

   An offensive term for a person who lacks a permanent home.

   A homeless huddled in the doorway as the shop owner locked up for the night.

   Officers cleared every homeless from the underpass before the parade.

   Similarvagrant, tramp, drifter, derelict, bum

   Note

   A count noun made from the adjective, complete with its own plural: one homeless, several homelesses. It is nonstandard and can give offense. Careful writing keeps the word as an adjective with a noun, as in homeless people or a homeless family. It can also use the collective the homeless, as in The Police and the Homeless, rather than counting individuals with it.

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