Background: Within nursing, the concepts of home and homelike have been used indiscriminately to describe characteristics of health care settings that resemble a home more than an institution.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the concept of home (hem in Swedish). The main questions were as follows: What does the concept of home entail etymologically and semantically? Of what significance is the meaning of the concept to caring science and nursing?

Design and methods: This study had a qualitative design with a hermeneutical approach guided by Gadamer. Eriksson’s model of concept determination was partly used to determine the etymology and semantics, the essence and epistemic category of the concept of home. In this study, etymological dictionaries and 17 Swedish language dictionaries published between 1850 and 2001 were investigated.

Findings: The home, framed as the ethos of caring, can be drawn as a three-dimensional picture where the three dimensions have a common core, enclosed and inviolable. Symbolically, the picture of home can be seen as the ethos of the human being’s innermost room, the human being’s manner of being and the tone cxpressed in the external or abstract room where the human being lives and interacts with others.

Conclusions: Based on the findings in this study we conclude that home as ethos is an inner ethical dimension within the human being. Human beings who are in contact with their ethos, the self, feel at home and dare to follow the voice of their heart. Nurses who experience at-homeness have an ability to invite the patient into a caring relationship. The home and the feeling of being at home have significant meaning in terms of human beings’ health and well-being.