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harvest home

harvest home

1 7.2
A festival at the end of the farming year when people gather to celebrate crops
  • noun
  • Archaic
translation icon : festival de la cosecha
  • After weeks of hard work, the farmers finally brought the harvest home and held a festival to honor their bounty.

Examples

  • The community gathers every autumn to celebrate the tradition of harvest home with music and dance.

  • During the harvest home, families come together to share food and give thanks for the crops they have gathered.

  • Let's get this harvest home.

  • Desirable as I should think it to have our sheep-shearings and harvest-homes conducted in such a way that a psalm might be sung at them without profanation, yet from what I have myself seen of such meetings, I should scarcely think it desirable or practicable.

    Academic text (2016)

Synonyms

harvest festival
vsharvest home
5 3.3

A community celebration that marks the end of the harvest with food and music

focuses on the actual gathering in of ripe crops as well as the celebration

How Big

harvest home
  • Archaic
1 7.2

Surface Forms

harvest home singular
harvest homes plural

Morphology

harvest + home

The word 'harvest' clearly signals crop gathering, so a learner can guess the phrase relates to the end of the harvest period, but 'home' does not transparently convey the idea of a celebration or festival. The phrase is somewhat idiomatic and historically specific (often British/archaic), so the full sense 'a harvest celebration' is not fully predictable without prior exposure.

Etymology

Harvest home comes from village life when people finished bringing in the harvest and carried the last load into the home or barn. They would feast, sing and give thanks, so the phrase came to mean a 'festival' marking the 'end of the harvest'.