Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An apartment in a hospital or other institution, or a separate building, where dead bodies are kept for a time; a morgue.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A morgue; a place for the temporary reception and exposure of dead bodies.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A morgue; a place for the temporary reception and exposure of dead bodies.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

dead +‎ house

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Examples

  • There is also a hovel called a deadhouse, into which these bodies are conveyed till a grave has been dug in some “accursed place,” by members of an

    The Golden Chersonese and the way thither Isabella Lucy 2004

  • There is also a hovel called a deadhouse, into which these bodies are conveyed till a grave has been dug in some "accursed place," by members of an "accursed" class.

    The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither Isabella Lucy 1883

  • Meyer told his audience that he was proud that psychiatry had made the shift from the deadhouse to the study of “plain facts.”

    MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION Gary Greenberg 2010

  • In 1932, nearly four decades after he returned from Europe, Meyer recounted to the membership of the American Psychiatric Association of which he was then president about the time when he first came to America—“days when real science in medicine was identified with the deadhouse and the use of microscopes” and psychiatrists wanted nothing more than to adopt that identity.

    MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION Gary Greenberg 2010

  • He was snoring in a back room, and, like a man in the deadhouse of a bush shanty, not likely to wake before sunrise.

    Robbery Under Arms 2004

  • Yes, that the Strecker building was the deadhouse.

    The Dead House Linda Fairstein 2001

  • Documents that explained exactly what the deadhouse was.

    The Dead House Linda Fairstein 2001

  • The paper that bore the words the deadhouse, followed by a list of numbers.

    The Dead House Linda Fairstein 2001

  • When she called the place a ‘deadhouse,’ it conjured up ghosts of the people who perished there.

    The Dead House Linda Fairstein 2001

  • Chances were good that if your destination was Blackwells Island, as Lola said, you were going to the deadhouse.

    The Dead House Linda Fairstein 2001

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