stay-at-home

• stay at home

stay-at-home (not comparable)

1. (chiefly attributive) Of a parent: not employed and rather devoting more time to one's children.

   stay-at-home dad

   • 2020 May 25, Abby Ellin, “Couples Who Eat Together May Not Stay Together”, in New York Times‎:

     Ms. Andrews is forthright about her distress. “Jonathan’s eating habits have irritated me for years anyway and have only been exacerbated during the last six or seven weeks of him working from home,” said Ms. Andrews, 53, a stay-at-home parent who lives just outside London, in Surrey.

2. (attributive) Of rules or regulations: forbidding the populace to leave their domicile except under emergency or other special circumstances, especially for purposes of quarantine.

   stay-at-home orders

   • 2020 May 27, Jackie Rocheleau, “A Monday Is a Tuesday Is a Sunday as COVID-19 Disrupts Internal Clocks”, in Scientific American‎:

     In April Jenny Rappaport sat down to inspect her calendar because she could not tell how many days had passed since New Jersey’s stay-at-home order took effect.

3. (attributive) Of or relating to quarantine in the home.

   the stay-at-home era

   stay-at-home boredom

4. Not ever travelling or moving far from home.
   • 1899 February, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number M, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, , →OCLC, part I, page 195, column 1:

     He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their country—the sea.

• This adjective is mostly restricted to attributive use; predicative uses such as in “My mother is stay-at-home” do exist, but are quite rare.
• In particular, this adjective is most commonly found in the expressions stay-at-home mother, father, mom, dad, motherhood, and so on, or else used in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.

stay-at-home (plural stay-at-homes)

1. A person or animal that prefers to stay at home rather than socialize or travel.

   Synonym: homebody

   • 1911 August 20, Stephen Graham, “The White Night. Impressions of the Far North in Russia. From St. James’s Gazette.”, in The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, Calif., →ISSN, section “A Riverside Inn”, page 249, columns 2–3:

     I had a fancy to go there [Archangel in Russia]. Now my fancy has been gratified, and there is yet another place written down in the charts of my experience. And it is always a little saddening to exchange a dream for a reality—once also the Caucasus was a name crowded with boundless possibility, and I went there and saw what it was. I almost envy those stay-at-homes for whom Europe and the world is quite unproved.

   • 1960, “ Trip for Tommy. Children’s Press, 1953. $1.50.”, in Frieda M Heller, compiler, “I Can Read it Myself!”: Some Books for Independent Reading in the Primary Grades (Center for School Experimentation, Study of Independent Reading; Bulletin Number 1)‎, Columbus, Oh.: College of Education, The Ohio State University, →OCLC, page 13:

     Some animals are stay-at-homes, and some are travelers and migrate. Tommy, who finds this out, is a little like both.

   • 1997, Phillip C Schlechty, “ Stay-at-Homes”, in Inventing Better Schools: An Action Plan for Educational Reform (The Jossey-Bass Education Series), San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass Publishers, →ISBN, page 218:

     Many stay-at-homes stay at home because they truly love the place. Of course, some people simply are too timid to go to unfamiliar places.

   • 2000, Anthony Stevens, John Price, “Anxiety and phobic disorders”, in Evolutionary Psychiatry: A New Beginning, 2nd edition, London; Philadelphia, Pa.: Routledge, →ISBN, part II (Disorders of attachment and rank), page 106:

     Other species, like wildebeest, forage over large distances, while others again, like birds, are strictly territorial at certain times of the year yet, at other times, have the capacity to make long migrations. But on the whole, animals are ‘stay-at-homes’, and it is the ability to leave home without anxiety that is exceptional and which requires explanation.

   • 2005, Joni Phelps Hunt, “Hiding out & passing for poisonous”, in A Shimmer of Butterflies: The Brief, Brilliant Life of a Magical Insect, Montrose, Calif.: London Town Press, →ISBN, page 35, column 1:

     Both the hardy long-distance travelers and the butterfly stay-at-homes face continual danger from predators.

2. A parent who is not employed and rather devoting more time to children.
   • 1990, Ruth Carter, Gill Kirkup, quoting Meg, “ Children and childcare”, in Jo Campling, editor, Women in Engineering: A Good Place to Be? (Women in Society: A Feminist List), Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education Ltd, →ISBN, page 102:

     We [women], I guess, got into the habit of being stay-at-homes while our children were small because you’re not there during the day with them, you tend to spend your evenings and weekends [with them] […]

   • 2001, Laura Hapke, “From Black Folk to Working Class: African American Labor Fiction between the World Wars”, in Labor’s Text: The Worker in American Fiction, New Brunswick, N.J.; London: Rutgers University Press, →ISBN, part II (The Road to 1930), page 205:

     Many of the women domestics and store clerks become stay-at-homes by default. Their immersion in their own needs, their hunger for something, prompts a comparison to Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and the white aspiration theme of so much 1920s work fiction.

   • 2004, Charlie Leckenby, “ The Stay-At-Home Dad Blues”, in Peter Baylies, Jessica Toonkel, The Stay-at-Home Dad Handbook, Chicago, Ill.: Chicago Review Press, →ISBN, page 188:

     Like many stay-at-home dads, I found myself both elated and paralyzed by the idea of caring for our son eights hours a day, five days a week. My wife and I were in the same position many stay-at-homes face: she made more money than I did, and the cost of daycare per month was as much as I was making in a month.