meaning of homeworking

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Definition of homework

Examples of homework in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'homework.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

1662, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Dictionary Entries Near homework

Cite this entry.

“Homework.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/homework. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of homework, more from merriam-webster on homework.

Thesaurus: All synonyms and antonyms for homework

Nglish: Translation of homework for Spanish Speakers

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Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about homework

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Advancing social justice, promoting decent work

Ilo is a specialized agency of the united nations, receive ilo news, follow us on.

Working from home

Homeworkers need to be better protected, says the ILO

The dramatic increase in working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the poor working conditions experienced by many homeworkers who, prior to the crisis, numbered an estimated 260 million people worldwide.

Renewed urgency

Poorly regulated with lack of compliance

Only 10 ILO Member States have ratified Convention No. 177, that promotes equality of treatment between homeworkers and other wage earners, and few have a comprehensive policy on homework." Janine Berg, ILO senior economist and one of the report’s authors

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Definition of homework noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

• I always do my homework on the bus.
• physics/geography/French, etc. homework
• I still haven't done my geography homework.
• How much homework do you get?
• for homework I have to write up the notes for homework.
• (especially North American English) I have to finish this homework assignment .
• acquire/​get/​lack (an) education/​training/ (British English) (some) qualifications
• receive/​provide somebody with training/​tuition
• develop/​design/​plan a curriculum/ (especially British English) course/ (North American English) program/​syllabus
• give/​go to/​attend a class/​lesson/​lecture/​seminar
• hold/​run/​conduct a class/​seminar/​workshop
• sign up for/​take a course/​classes/​lessons
• go to/​start preschool/​kindergarten/​nursery school
• be in (North American English) the first, second, etc. grade/ (British English) year 1, 2. etc. (at school)
• study/​take/​drop history/​chemistry/​German, etc.
• (British English) leave/​finish/​drop out of/ (North American English) quit school
• (North American English) graduate high school/​college
• be the victim/​target of bullying
• (British English) play truant from/ (both British English, informal) bunk off/​skive off school (= not go to school when you should)
• (both especially North American English) skip/​cut class/​school
• (British English) cheat in/ (North American English) cheat on an exam/​a test
• get/​be given a detention (for doing something)
• be expelled from/​be suspended from school
• do your homework/ (British English) revision/​a project on something
• work on/​write/​do/​submit an essay/​a dissertation/​a thesis/​an assignment/ (North American English) a paper
• finish/​complete your dissertation/​thesis/​studies/​coursework
• hand in/ (North American English) turn in your homework/​essay/​assignment/​paper
• study/​prepare/ (British English) revise/ (North American English) review/ (North American English, informal) cram for a test/​an exam
• take/ (both British English) do/​sit a test/​an exam
• (especially British English) mark/ (especially North American English) grade homework/​a test
• (British English) do well in/ (North American English) do well on/ (especially North American English, informal) ace a test/​an exam
• pass/​fail/ (especially North American English, informal) flunk a test/​an exam/​a class/​a course/​a subject
• apply to/​get into/​go to/​start college/ (British English) university
• leave/​graduate from law school/​college/ (British English) university (with a degree in computer science)
• study for/​take/ (British English) do/​complete a law degree/​a degree in physics
• (both North American English) major/​minor in biology/​philosophy
• earn/​receive/​be awarded/​get/​have/​hold a master’s degree/​a bachelor’s degree/​a PhD in economics
• Have you finished your homework?
• Have you done your physics homework yet?
• I was helping my sister with her maths homework.
• The homework assignments are worth 10% of the final grade.
• I have some homework to do on the Civil War.
• I want you to hand in this homework on Friday.
• The science teacher always gives a lot of homework.
• They get a lot of homework in English.
• They get masses of homework at secondary school.
• We had to write out one of the exercises for homework.
• for homework
• homework  on

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• You could tell that he had really done his homework (= found out all he needed to know) .

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Homeworking sounds good – until your job takes over your life

Some may want an escape from the office grind, but remote working could eat into downtime and increase inequality

T he supposedly looming return to normality – whatever that is – may have almost squashed the hopes of a more equal, mutual-aiding, communitarian country that briefly flared to life during the first lockdown. But for those lucky enough to have a job that can just about be done without leaving the house, perhaps one alleged source of optimism still burns bright.

Big companies seem more open than ever to the idea of homeworking arrangements staying in place even after the worst of the pandemic is over and restrictions are lifted, and for some people the old grind of commuting and congregating in offices may at least partially be over. What this could mean for the smaller businesses that depend on the presence of large employers is clear from our emptied-out city centres, but “hybrid working” is the season’s most fashionable corporate concept, often talked up in the same la-di-da tones as all those lockdown-based articles about Zoom fatigue and the trials of baking bread.

In more sober tones, the Financial Times recently reported that some of Britain’s largest employers are in the midst of “reviews of working practices” and that most of the companies its journalists had contacted said they expected to soon introduce employment models split between the office and home. They included the professional services company PricewaterhouseCoopers, NatWest, HSBC (which apparently expects to cut its “property footprint” by 40%), Virgin Media and the online retail giant Very, whose “chief people officer” sounded less like a bringer of good news than someone cracking the whip: “We want our colleagues to be hyperproductive at home and hypercollaborative in the office.”

The current push for homeworking is tangled up with such genuinely liberating possibilities as the four-day week, but the differences between them are obvious. Long before the arrival of Covid-19, technology was blurring the distinctions between leisure and work, as demands on people’s time poured into their homes via laptops and smartphones, and ambitious twentysomethings were sold a new dream of apartment blocks that come with state-of-the-art workspaces.

In Europe, there is rising noise about the so-called “right to disconnect”, whereby workers can enforce the separation of work and downtime. But the pandemic also seems to have created the perfect pretext for the two becoming fatally blurred: if your home now doubles as your workplace, you should not be surprised if your job seems to have taken over even more of your life.

In September last year, researchers at New York University and Harvard Business School published their analysis of the emails and online meetings of 3.1 million remote workers in such cities as Chicago, New York, London, Tel Aviv and Brussels, in the very early phases of their countries’ first lockdowns. They found that the length of the average working day had increased by 8.2%, or nearly 50 minutes, “largely due to writing emails and attending meetings beyond office hours”.

The researchers acknowledged the possibility that longer days might sometimes be the result of people having “freedom over their own schedule”, but also talked about a possible “blurred distinction between work and personal life, in which it becomes easy to overwork due to the lack of clear delineation between the office and home”. Here, perhaps, is the key to the widely held belief that homeworking makes people more productive: it may well do, but only because it makes them put in more hours. A subsequent report by the British thinktank Autonomy saw in the research something insidious and perhaps unstoppable, “society’s shift away from synchronous to asynchronous work, where hours are put in at any time, and the week expands bit by bit”.

If this happens, the negative consequences will snowball. Recent UK reports have found that more than a quarter of people working from home do so from either a sofa or a bedroom, and that more than a third have developed musculoskeletal problems. And what of the psychological effects of technology that enables companies to monitor homeworkers’ activity, or the lack of it? Tracking software is becoming a common feature of remote-working setups, and the names of the apps on offer are often less than subtle – one package offering “work time tracking, productivity measurement, all activity tracking [and] absence monitoring” is called StaffCop .

It is not exactly a revelation that the stresses and pressures of homeworking fall disproportionately on women, who are often faced with an impossible pile-up of childcare, home schooling and the demand to be constantly on call. Again, research from the US is instructive here, showing that men are far more likely than women to experience homeworking as a boost to their productivity and career prospects (and if you want to instantly understand the gender politics of this crisis, consider that 3 million women have dropped out of the American workforce in the past year). To those privileged and self-confident enough to embrace the idea of a life without them, workplaces might be bywords for tedium and anxiety, but they are also where efforts to tackle inequalities acquire coherent shape. If employees are scattered, these things will often either founder, or not start in the first place.

Clearly, the rising prevalence of working from home also threatens new dimensions to class inequality. The daily commute and eight or so hours spent in a workplace at least denoted some kind of universal experience. Now, we seem to be on the cusp of a new economic model that splits people between those allowed – or positively encouraged – to work from home, and others who simply can’t. Moreover, those supposedly able to embrace homeworking will have drastically different experiences according to their domestic environment.

Space and quiet are likely to become new determinants of status, which will surely further increase the disadvantages piled on to the young: there is, after all, a big difference between labouring in a shared house and creating a home office in some expansive residence in the suburbs or countryside. We also need to think about the way that weakened ties to the office might dilute employers’ obligations to some of their staff – today’s homeworker could easily become tomorrow’s freelancer, with the loss of rights that usually implies.

Freedom and flexibility are nice words to put on motivational posters, but no one should overlook the eternal tensions between those old adversaries capital and labour – and how people are likely to accept demands from their employers in the midst of raised unemployment and difficult post-pandemic times. After-hours Zoom sessions and endless emails might eat into time once kept free of work, but if the alternative is either universal credit or the gig economy, will anyone want to complain? This, I fear, is the perfect way to lay a path to a future that would be hellish: phones trilling long into the evening, surveillance software following our every domestic move, and the barrier between work and leisure dissolving into nothing.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

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homeworking noun

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What does the noun homeworking mean?

There is one meaning in OED's entry for the noun homeworking . See ‘Meaning & use’ for definition, usage, and quotation evidence.

How common is the noun homeworking ?

How is the noun homeworking pronounced, british english, u.s. english, where does the noun homeworking come from.

Earliest known use

The earliest known use of the noun homeworking is in the 1840s.

OED's earliest evidence for homeworking is from 1844, in Northern Star .

homeworking is formed within English, by compounding.

Etymons: home n. 1 , working n.

Nearby entries

• homeware, n. 1782–
• home waters, n. 1838–
• home wear, n. 1836–
• home-whining, n. a1657
• home wind, n. 1732–
• home-woe, n. 1838–
• homework, n. 1653–
• homework club, n. 1900–
• homework diary, n. 1973–
• homeworker, n. 1843–
• homeworking, n. 1844–
• home-working, adj. 1850–
• home worship, n. 1849–
• homewort, n. Old English–
• home-wreck, n. 1845–
• home-wrecker, n. 1878–
• home-wrecking, n. 1878–
• home-wrecking, adj. 1878–
• home zone, n. 1992–
• homichlin, n. 1859–
• homicidal, adj. 1725–

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Meaning & use

Pronunciation, entry history for homeworking, n..

Originally published as part of the entry for homework, n.

homeworking, n. was revised in September 2011.

homeworking, n. was last modified in July 2023.

oed.com is a living text, updated every three months. Modifications may include:

• further revisions to definitions, pronunciation, etymology, headwords, variant spellings, quotations, and dates;
• new senses, phrases, and quotations.

Revisions and additions of this kind were last incorporated into homeworking, n. in July 2023.

Earlier versions of this entry were published in:

A Supplement to the OED, Volume II (1976)

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OED Second Edition (1989)

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Citation details

Factsheet for homeworking, n., browse entry.

homeworking

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• Meaning of homeworking

homeworking ( English)

Origin & history.

• Working from home , especially when in electronic contact with a central office.

Automatically generated practical examples in English:

With the rapid evolution in homeworking brought on by the Covid-19 emergency, auctioneers are witnessing a significant increase in interest in properties with more space and more distance from the madding crowd. Independent.ie, 8 June 2020

The Prime Minister and Chancellor are said to be aghast at the impact empty offices are having on town centre shops and restaurants - and worried that homeworking is wrecking UK productivity. Mail Online, 10 July 2020

The preppers among us had panic-shopped while awaiting his pronouncements, and others fretted about vulnerable loved ones, travel plans, the nightmare of simultaneous homeworking and home-schooling, and not being able to work at all. The Guardian, 18 March 2020

▾  Further examples

This seems even more feasible today, in a world when the nine to five has been replaced by gig-economy jobs and homeworking parents spend their evenings with laptops on their knees. Slashdot, 11 August 2020

The things you can and can’t ask for if your boss says your days of homeworking are overFirms grapple with homeworking puzzleYou can ask to work remotely on a permanent basis but your boss does not have to agree. The Guardian, 20 August 2021

British Airways said it was considering selling its headquarters building because of a switch to homeworking during the pandemic means it may no longer need so much office space. Independent.ie, 19 March 2021

For Hays, the new acquisition is an ideal fit with its homeworking model which has seen many individuals with good ideas progress to become successful independent businesses. Breaking Travel News, 3 June 2021

The mental health of parents with children in the final years of primary school was “most impaired” by homeworking during the pandemic, it has been revealed. Independent.ie, 13 June 2022

▾  Dictionary entries

Entries where "homeworking" occurs:

homeworker : homeworker (English) Noun homeworker (pl. homeworkers) A person who works from home ( homeworking ).

home working : home working (English) Noun home working (uncountable) Alternative form of homeworking ‎. 2020 December 2, Mark Phillips, Rebuilding Rail in the 2020s, Rail, page 46: "The full implications of the pandemic on future demand for rail travel are yet to be…

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Cite this page : "homeworking" – WordSense Online Dictionary (17th April, 2024) URL: https://www.wordsense.eu/homeworking/

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homeworkless (English)

homeworks (English)

homeworld (English)

homeworlds (English)

homewrecker (English)

homewreckers (English)

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homeworkers , culvert , homeworker

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Meaning of homework in English

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• The kids are busy with their homework.
• My science teacher always sets a lot of homework.
• "Have you got any homework tonight ?" "No."
• I got A minus for my English homework.
• For homework I want you to write an essay on endangered species .
• academic year
• access course
• Advanced Placement
• asynchronous
• foundation course
• immersion course
• interdisciplinarity
• on a course
• open admissions
• open classroom
• work placement

homework | American Dictionary

Homework | business english, examples of homework, translations of homework.

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balancing act

a difficult situation in which someone has to try to give equal amounts of importance, time, attention, etc. to two or more different things at the same time

Binding, nailing, and gluing: talking about fastening things together

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Definition of 'homework'

Video: pronunciation of homework

homework in American English

Homework in british english, examples of 'homework' in a sentence homework, related word partners homework, trends of homework.

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• homeward journey
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• do homework
• school homework
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Meaning of "homeworking" in the English dictionary

Pronunciation of homeworking, grammatical category of homeworking, what does homeworking mean in english.

Small office/home office

Definition of homeworking in the english dictionary.

The definition of homeworking in the dictionary is the practice of working at home, rather than in a factory or office.

WORDS THAT RHYME WITH HOMEWORKING

Words that begin like homeworking, words that end like homeworking, synonyms and antonyms of homeworking in the english dictionary of synonyms, words relating to «homeworking», translation of «homeworking» into 25 languages.

TRANSLATION OF HOMEWORKING

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FREQUENCY OF USE OF THE TERM «HOMEWORKING» OVER TIME

Examples of use in the english literature, quotes and news about homeworking, 10 english books relating to «homeworking», 10 news items which include the term «homeworking».

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