Cottage
name, noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A small house.
"So when four years were wholly finished, / She threw her royal robes away. / “Make me a cottage in the vale,” she said, / “Where I may mourn and pray."
- 2 a small house with a single story wordnet
- 3 A seasonal home of any size or stature, a recreational home or a home in a remote location.
"Most cottages in the area were larger and more elaborate than my home."
- 4 A public lavatory. UK, archaic, slang
- 5 A meeting place for homosexual men. Polari
- 1 To stay at a seasonal home, to go cottaging.
- 2 To have homosexual sex in a public lavatory; to practice cottaging. Polari, intransitive
- 1 A township in Saline County, Illinois.
- 2 An unincorporated community in Macon County, Missouri, United States.
- 3 A village in Rivière du Rempart District, Mauritius.
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"There is a cottage beyond the bridge."
Etymology
Late Middle English, from Anglo-Norman cotage and Medieval Latin cotagium, from Old Northern French cot, cote (“hut, cottage”) + -age (“surrounding property”), from Proto-Germanic *kutą, *kuta- (“shed”), probably of non-Indo-European origin, possibly borrowed from Uralic; compare Finnish kota (“hut, house”) and Hungarian ház (“house”), both from Proto-Finno-Ugric/Proto-Uralic *kota. However, also compare Dutch and English hut. Old Northern French cote is probably from Old Norse kot (“hut”), cognate of Old English cot of same Proto-Germanic origin. Slang sense “public toilet” from 19th century, due to resemblance.
Related phrases
More for "cottage"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.