means A house and the land around it occupied as a family home, especially one a settler claimed and worked to make self-sufficient.

from A plain Old English compound of 'ham' (home) and 'stede' (place, stead) — literally a 'home-place' — kin to words like 'instead' and 'bedstead,' all from that old Germanic 'stede' meaning a standing-spot or position. It rode along quietly for centuries until America gave it a new charge: the Homestead Act, which handed out frontier land to anyone who'd settle and farm it, cementing the word's flavor of land claimed and earned by labor.