Words – Housen

Further to my post about Recorder Road, I liked the use of the word “housen”.

The above chart (I’ve embedded it, so if there’s nothing there, blame Google) shows how the word usage has fallen back over the twentieth century, although it was very much a late nineteenth century word. The word ‘housen’ is simply the plural of house, which is a more beautiful word than ‘houses’ and although it was never that common it has become pretty much entirely archaic now.

There aren’t many words now which shove an “n” at the end to make a plural, but there used to be. The plural of tree was sometimes ‘treen’, knee was ‘kneen’, shoe was ‘shoon’ and even Shakespeare used the word ‘eyen’ as the plural for eye. And, of course, in German the practice of adding the ‘n’ is still common for many words.