House, n. A hollow edifice erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse, beetle, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus, and microbe.

This definition comes from Ambrose Bierce’s satirical lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary, a work he developed over many years from earlier newspaper columns (notably under the title The Cynic’s Word Book). Bierce, a journalist and veteran of the American Civil War, used mock “dictionary” entries to puncture Victorian-era pieties and expose the less flattering realities beneath respectable social life. The entry for “House” reflects late-19th/early-20th-century urban experience—crowded dwellings, pests, and growing awareness of germs—turning the supposedly safe, private home into a shared habitat for vermin and microbes.

Bierce reduces the sentimental ideal of the home to a biological and ecological fact: a house is not a sanctuary for “man” alone but an enclosure that inevitably hosts parasites and pathogens. The humor comes from the deadpan, scientific tone (“n.”; “edifice”; the catalog of creatures) and the escalating list that ends with the invisible (“bacillus, and microbe”), undercutting human pretensions to cleanliness and control. The definition also hints at modern anxieties about hygiene and contagion, suggesting that domestic comfort rests on a fragile boundary between civilization and the teeming life it tries—and fails—to exclude.