empty nest
noun
a household in which one or more parents live after the children have left home: Our only child just moved into her first apartment, so we have an empty nest.
a stage in a parent’s life after the children have left home.
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Nearby words
- empty,
- empty calorie,
- empty calories,
- empty cow,
- empty morph,
- empty nester,
- empty set,
- empty suit,
- empty word,
- empty-handed
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2019
empty nest
The stage in a family's cycle when the children have grown up and left home to begin their own adult lives.
Note
For parents, the empty nest sometimes results in midlife anxiety.
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
empty nest
The home of parents whose children have grown up and moved out. For example, Now that they had an empty nest, Jim and Jane opened a bed-and-breakfast. This expression, alluding to a nest from which baby birds have flown, gave rise to such related ones as empty-nester, for a parent whose children had moved out, and empty-nest syndrome, for the state of mind of parents whose children had left. [c. 1970]
The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary
Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.