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Home-made or homemade?

home-made is an adjective meaning “Alternative form of homemade”; homemade is an adjective meaning “Made at home”. home-made is written with a hyphen and homemade as one word; they are used differently.

home-madeorhomemade

What is the difference between home-made and homemade?

home-madehomemade
Part of speechadjectiveadjective
Meaning

Alternative form of homemade

Made at home

Made by oneself

Examplenone recordeda homemade chicken casserole
Pronunciationnot recorded/ˌ(h)əʊmˈmeɪ̯d/ /ˌhoʊmˈmeɪ̯d/
In writingnot counted (the list counts single words)6.5 times per million words

Sources: home-made and homemade in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Every current meaning of home-made and homemade

home-made

  1. 1

    adjective Alternative form of homemade

homemade

  1. 1

    adjective Made at home

    a homemade chicken casserole

  2. 2

    adjective Made by oneself

    Near-synonyms: homebrew, handmade

  3. 3

    adjective In a simple style as if made at home

    Near-synonym: homespun

Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.

Which is more common, home-made or homemade?

home-made is a phrase, which the list of single words does not count; homemade 6.5 times per million words.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

How many people search home-made vs homemade?

“home-made vs homemade” is searched about 40 times a month on Google and 10 on Bing in the United States. Google counts close variants of a query together (“homemade vs home-made”, “home-made or homemade”).

Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.

The words