Gregory House is a fictional character and the titular protagonist of the American medical drama series House. Created by David Shore and portrayed by English actor Hugh Laurie, he leads a team of diagnosticians and is the Head of Diagnostic Medicine at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in Princeton, New Jersey. House's character has been described as a misanthrope, cynic, narcissist, and curmudgeon.

In the series, the character's unorthodox diagnostic approaches, radical therapeutic motives, and stalwart rationality have resulted in much conflict between him and his colleagues. House is also often portrayed as lacking sympathy for his patients, a practice that allows him time to solve ethical enigmas. The character is partly based on Sherlock Holmes. A portion of the show's plot centers on House's habitual use of Vicodin to manage pain stemming from leg infarction involving his quadriceps muscle some years earlier, an injury that forces him to walk with a cane. This dependency is also one of the many parallels to Holmes, who is portrayed as being a habitual user of cocaine and other drugs.

The character received generally positive reviews and was included in several "best of" lists. Tom Shales of The Washington Post called House "the most electrifying character to hit television in years". For his portrayal, Laurie won various awards, including two Golden Globe Awards for Best Actor in a Television Series – Drama, two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Best Actor from Drama Series, two Satellite Awards for Best Actor in a Television Series – Drama, two TCA Awards for Individual Achievement in Drama, and has received a total of six Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, which ties him for the most nominations in the category without a win.

Gregory House was born to John and Blythe House on June 11, 1959, or May 15, 1959. House is a military brat; his father served as a Marine Corps aviator and transferred often to other bases during House's childhood. House presumably picked up his affinity with languages during this period and shows a level of understanding of Chinese, Greek, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Hindi, and Yiddish. One place in which his father was stationed was Egypt, where House developed a fascination with archaeology and treasure-hunting, which led him to keep his treasure-hunting tools well into adulthood. Another station was Japan, where a 14-year-old House discovered his vocation after a rock-climbing incident with his friend. He witnessed the respect given to a buraku doctor who solved the case no other doctor could. He also spent some time in the Philippines, where he had dental surgery.

House loves his mother but hates his father, who he claims has an "insane moral compass", and deliberately attempts to avoid both parents. At one point (episode "One Day, One Room"), House tells a story of his parents leaving him with his grandmother, whose punishments constituted abuse. However, he later confesses it was his father who abused him. Due to this abuse, House never believed John was his biological father; at the age of 12, he inferred that a friend of the family with the same birthmark as himself was his real father. In the episode "Birthmarks", House discovers that John is not his biological father after ordering a DNA test. After a second DNA test was performed in the episode "Love is Blind", House discovers that the man he assumed to be his biological father, Thomas Bell, was not either. The identity of his real father remains unknown.

House first attended Johns Hopkins University for his undergraduate years as a physics major. Before fully committing to medicine as his discipline, he considered getting a Ph.D. in physics, researching dark matter. He was accepted to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and excelled during his time there. He was a frontrunner for a prestigious and competitive internship at the Mayo Clinic, but another student, Philip Weber, reported House for plagiarizing him, resulting in House's expulsion from Johns Hopkins and rejection from the internship. While appealing his expulsion, he studied at the University of Michigan Medical School and worked at a bookstore, where he met his future employer and love interest Lisa Cuddy, with whom he shared a night where "he gave her everything she asked for." Years later, Cuddy noted that House, although still a student, had already become "a legend" due to his diagnostic brilliance. After the appeal process, he was denied re-entry into Johns Hopkins. During a medical convention in New Orleans, House first saw his eventual best friend Dr. James Wilson. Wilson, who was going through his first divorce at the time, broke a mirror in frustration, and started a bar fight after a man repeatedly played "Leave a Tender Moment Alone" on a jukebox. Out of sheer boredom with the convention and to "have somebody to drink with", House paid for the damage, bailed him out, and hired an attorney to clear Wilson's name (which he failed to do), starting their professional and personal relationship. House identifies himself multiple times during the series as a "board-certified diagnostician with a double specialty in infectious disease and nephrology."

Approximately ten years before the beginning of the series, House entered into a relationship with Stacy Warner, a constitutional lawyer, after she shot him during a "Lawyers vs. Doctors" paintball match. Five years later, during a game of golf, he suffered an infarction in his right leg which went misdiagnosed for three days. House eventually diagnosed the infarction himself. An aneurysm in his thigh had clotted, leading to an infarction and causing his quadriceps muscle to become necrotic. House had the dead muscle bypassed to restore circulation to the remainder of his leg, risking organ failure and cardiac arrest. He was unwilling to allow an amputation, opting instead to endure excruciating post-operative pain to retain the use of his leg. However, after he was put into a chemically induced coma to sleep through the worst of the pain, Stacy, House's medical proxy, and Cuddy, who was House's doctor at the time, acted against his wishes and authorized a safer surgical middle-ground procedure between amputation and a bypass by removing just the dead muscle. This resulted in the partial loss of use in his leg and left House with a lesser, but still serious, level of pain for the rest of his life.

House could not forgive Stacy for making the decision after he obviously did not want the “safer” procedure; this was the reason Stacy eventually left him. House now suffers chronic pain in his thigh and uses a cane to aid his walking, though he often wields the cane for protection, pushing aside privacy curtains, stopping elevator doors, or knocking on doors. He also frequently takes Vicodin, a moderate to severe painkiller, to relieve his pain. House briefly breaks his dependency with psychiatric help, after he suffers a psychotic break. When Stacy makes her first appearance in season 1, she is married to a high school guidance counselor named Mark Warner. Although she and House have a brief intimate encounter during the second season, House eventually tells Stacy to go back to her husband, devastating her. In the season two finale "No Reason", the husband of one of House's former patients shoots him after his wife had committed suicide. At the beginning of season three, House temporarily regains his ability to walk and run after receiving ketamine treatment for his gunshot injuries; however, the chronic pain in his leg comes back and House, who seems depressed because of the returning pain, once again takes painkillers and uses his cane. The other doctors speculate his cane and opiate re-usage are due to his psychological tendencies. House eventually finds the one thing that seems to help the pain go away: practicing medicine. After he diagnoses a patient online for his team (without their knowledge), and shows his psychiatrist Dr. Nolan how this reduces his pain, Nolan suggests House resume his practice.