noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   The father of a family; the male head of household, or of any collection of persons living as a family or in common, as in a primitive community.
2. 2
   a man in charge of children in an institution wordnet
3. 3
   A man in charge of a residence for young people to look after them.

Etymology

Compound of house + father. Cognate with Dutch huisvader, German Hausvater, Swedish husfader, Icelandic húsfaðir.

Related phrases

boarding school

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.