COTTAGE: A cottage is, typically, a small house. The word comes from England where it originally was a house that has a ground floor, with a first, lower storey of bedrooms which fit within the roofspace. In many places the word cottage is used to mean a small old-fashioned house. In modern usage, a cottage is usually a modest, often cosy dwelling, typically in a rural or semi-rural location. In the United Kingdom the term cottage denotes a small dwelling of traditional build, although it can also be applied to dwellings of modern construction which are designed to resemble traditional ones ("mock cottages").

In the United States the word cottage is often used to mean a small holiday home. However there are cottage-style dwellings in cities, and in places such as Canada the term exists with no connotations of size at all (cf. vicarage or hermitage). In certain countries (e.g. Scandinavia, Baltics, and Russia) the term "cottage" has local synonyms: In Finnish mökki; in Estonian suvila; in Swedish stuga; in Norwegian hytte (from the German word Hütte); in Slovak chalupa; in Russian дача (dacha; which can refer to a vacation/summer home, often located near a body of water).

In the USA this type of summer home is more commonly called a "cabin", "chalet", or even "camp". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term cottage is used in North America to represent "a summer residence (often on a large and sumptuous scale) at a watering-place or a health or pleasure resort" with its first recognised use dating to 1882, in reference to Bar Harbor in Maine. In North America, most buildings known as cottages are used for weekend or summer getaways by city dwellers. It is also common for the owners of cottages to rent their properties to tourists as a source of revenue.

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