A cottage, during England's feudal period, was the holding by a cottager (known as a cotter or bordar) of a small house with enough garden to feed a family and in return for the cottage, the cottager had to provide some form of service to the manorial lord. However, in time cottage just became the general term for a small house. In modern usage, a cottage is usually a modest, often cosy dwelling, typically in a rural or semi-rural location and not necessarily in England. The cottage orné, often quite large and grand residences built by the nobility, dates back to a movement of "rustic" stylised cottages of the late 18th and early 19th century during the Romantic movement.

In British English the term now denotes a small, cosy dwelling of traditional build, although it can also be applied to modern construction designed to resemble traditional houses ("mock cottages"). Cottages may be detached houses, or terraced, such as those built to house workers in mining villages. The tied accommodation provided to farm workers was usually a cottage, see cottage garden. In England the term holiday cottage now denotes a specialised form of residential let property, attracting various tax benefits to the owner.

The holiday cottage exists in many cultures under different names. In Canadian English and American English, "cottage" is one term for such holiday homes, although they may also be called a "cabin", "chalet", or even "camp". In Australia, the term "cabin" is common, cottage usually referring to a smaller pre-modern period dwelling. In certain countries (e.g. Nordics, Baltics, and Russia) the term "cottage" has local synonyms: In Finnish mökki, in Estonian suvila, in Latvian vasarnīca, in Livonian sõvvõkuodā, in Swedish stuga, in Norwegian hytte (from the German word Hütte), in Czech or Slovak chata or chalupa, in Russian дача (dacha).

In places such as Canada, "cottage" carries no connotations of size (compare with vicarage or hermitage).

The word cottage (Medieval Latin cotagium) derives from Old English cot, cote "hut" and Old French cot "hut, cottage", from Old Norse kot "hut" and related to Middle Low German kotten (cottage, hut). Examples of this may be found in 15th century manor court rolls.^{[citation needed]} The house of the cottage bore the Latin name: "domus", while the barn of the cottage was termed "grangia".

The word originally referred to a humble rural detached dwelling of a cotter, a semi-independent resident of a manor who had certain residential rights from the lord of the manor, and who in the social hierarchy was a grade above the slave (mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086), who had no right of tenure and worked full-time to the orders of the lord. In the Domesday Book, they were referred to as Coterelli. The cottage had a small amount of surrounding agricultural land, perhaps two or three acres, from which the resident gained his livelihood and sustenance. It was defined by its function of housing a cotter, rather than by its form, which varied, but it was certainly small and cheaply built and purely functional, with no non-essential architectural flourishes. It would have been built from the cheapest locally available materials and in the local style, thus in wheat-growing areas, it would be roofed in thatch, and in slate-rich locations, such as Cornwall, slates would be used for roofing. In stone-rich areas, its walls would be built of rubble stone, and in other areas, such as Devon, was commonly built from cob.

In England from about the 18th century onwards, the development of industry led to the development of weavers' cottages and miners' cottages. Friedrich Engels cites 'Cottages' as a poor quality dwelling in his 1845 work The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Over the years various English acts of Parliament removed the right of the cottager to hold land. According to John Lawrence Hammond and Barbara Hammond in their book The Village Labourer, before an inclosure act a cottager was a farm labourer with land, and after an inclosure act the cottager was a farm labourer without land.