# halfway house

> English word · Noun

## Definitions
1. A temporary residence for those who have left prison, residential drug rehabilitation, or the like, designed to ease them back into society.
2. A halfway point towards achieving a goal.
3. An inn reached about midway through a journey.
4. Any place of calm and respite reached during a journey.

## Etymology
The term in its original sense (the literal one) was clearly already a well-established term when Samuel Pepys mentioned a prominent example in his diary in 1662.

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/halfway-house