ABSTRACT
The English word ‘house’ is an old word. In Anglo-Saxon times it would mean to most men a one-roomed but of wattle and daub or wood, used for their habitation and that of their families and some domestic animals. But houses have changed since then, and so to a modern Englishman the word means something different. There is still an objective resemblance: the thing still stands on the ground, has walls, roof and door and holes for windows and chimney, and the same general shape. The English word to ‘sell’ signified in O.E. (sellan) ‘to hand over’. In modern English to sell signifies to agree to transfer the ownership of a thing for a sum of money, and also to perform the agreement. So barter was turned into sale; but in the Anglo-Saxon period sale was still a cash transaction.
