As the holiday travel season descends, many of us go back to spend a bit of time in the houses of our childhood.

While they might have seemed like mansions in the eyes of a little kid, we rarely find them quite so grand when we're squished together

in the dining room between Aunt Kate and all the cousins.

But what exactly does it take to change a house into a mansion?

Well, not much, it turns out, beyond a little French charm.

At least if we consider the history of the words we use to refer to the places we reside.

Grammar Girl here, I'm in Jan Fog Fog Fog,

your friendly guide to the English language.

Stick around because after we talk about the origin of words like House and

Mansion, I have a fam elect that also includes the word House,

and I try to get to the bottom of its origin.

The word house is a native English word,

meaning we got it from the Germanic languages that developed into Old English after the Angles, Saxons,

and Jutes settled on the British Isles in the 5th century.

The ancient Germanic word for house was Koussan, but by the time it made it into English, the K sound had dropped off,

leaving us with just Hoose, H-U-S.

This type of sound loss wasn't unusual. In fact the ancient word for heart also originally started with a K.

It was Kerr, K-E-R, which explains why cardiac and heart refer to the same vital organ but sounds so different.

Cardiac was borrowed into English from the Latin word for Heart, Core, C-O-R,

where it never dropped the original K sound at the beginning.

The word Hart, on the other hand, came to English from Germanic origins, where its K had long been left behind, and only a puff of air, otherwise known as an H, remained. But the most interesting thing about the origin of the word house is that it's etymology related to the verb

to hide. Probably because way back in human history a house was a covering or shelter that

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