staycation

Definition

a holiday in which you stay at home and visit places near to where you live, or a holiday in your own country

View the full definition in the Macmillan Dictionary.

Origin and usage

The noun staycation is formed by combining the words ‘stay‘ (or ‘stay-at-home’) and ‘vacation’, making it a portmanteau word or blend. It was first used in the early 2000s.

Examples

The term staycation originated in North America, as is indicated by the ‘vacation’ part of the word. It was originally used to refer to the activity covered by the first half of our definition, meaning a holiday in which you stay at home and enjoy all its comforts while visiting places nearby. In British English it has come to be understood mainly in the meaning in the second half of the definition: a holiday taken in your own country. The use of the term ‘holiday’ is significant. Brits generally refer to time spent not working or studying as a holiday while American English refers to this as a vacation, reserving ‘holiday‘ for a fixed day of celebration when people do not have to go to school or work. In the days before cheap air travel and package holidays the term staycation would have been mostly unnecessary because most people took their holidays at home, with foreign travel reserved for a small minority. Someone who goes on a staycation can be referred to as a staycationer. The traditional term for this was ‘holidaymaker‘. The humorous term ‘daycation‘, which actually antedates staycation by a couple of decades, is what most of us would refer to as a day out or a day trip.