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Glite Dictionary
home to

home to

180 1.4
A place where people, animals, plants, or things are found
  • phrasal verb
translation icon : albergar
  • Americans tend not to think much about Mexico, home to their 100 million neighbors.
  • home to many
  • forests are home to
  • home to 30 million

Only China, Russia and India are home to smaller properties.

Examples

  • Chicago is now home to nearly as many Mexicans as live in the entire state.

    Academic text (2008)

  • Northern New Jersey is actually the home to the US Pharmaceutical industry.

  • It's so weird to come home to a different space.

  • I for one would like to make it home to my family one day.

  • And she went home to her family, a different woman.

  • Have you no wish to go home to see the city again?

  • You had no place to go home to and I gave you a home.

    Ruby (1992)

  • We're already home to four of the world's largest offshore wind farms.

  • Maine is home to many, many Maple trees.

  • The Amazon rainforest in Brazil is still home to more species than anywhere else on Earth.

Antonyms

alien
685 4.1

From another place and not familiar there

Surface Forms

home to main

Morphology

home + to

The meaning is directly compositional: 'home' denotes a place where something lives or is found and the preposition 'to' marks the relation ('is home to' = 'hosts/contains'). This locative phrasing has close parallels in many languages, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents can reliably infer the MWE's meaning.

Etymology

Home to comes from the clear picture of a home as the place where someone 'lives'. When we say a city is home to museums, we imagine the museums living there, so home to now means 'has' or 'hosts' something.