hut

plural huts

1. A small, simple one-storey dwelling or shelter, often with just one room, and generally built of readily available local materials.

   a thatched hut; a mud hut; a shepherd’s hut

   4 more examples

   And in his Hut, when hee to rest doth take him, Hee sleeps, till Drums or deadlie Pellets wake him.

   1625, Nicholas Breton, “An Untrained Souldiour”, in Characters and Essayes, Aberdeen: Edward Raban, page 31

   1751, Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 186, 28 December, 1751, Volume 6, London: J. Payne and J. Bouquet, 1752, pp. 108-109, […] love, that extends his dominion wherever humanity can be found, perhaps exerts the same power in the Greenlander’s hut, as in the palaces of eastern monarchs.

   […] I was a hired-out shepherd in a solitary hut, not seeing no faces but faces of sheep till I half forgot wot men’s and women’s faces wos like,

   1860 December – 1861 August, Charles Dickens, chapter XX, in Great Expectations […], volume II, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published October 1861, →OCLC, page 341

   There was an oil lamp in all the four huts on Okonkwo’s compound, and each hut seen from the others looked like a soft eye of yellow half-light set in the solid massiveness of night.

   1958 June 17, Chinua Achebe, chapter 11, in Things Fall Apart, New York, N.Y.: Astor-Honor, published 1959, →OCLC, part 1, page 99

2. A small wooden shed.

   a groundsman’s hut

3. obsoleteagricultureA small stack of grain.

present singular third person huts · participle present hutting · participle past hutted · past hutted

1. archaictransitiveTo provide (someone) with shelter in a hut.

   to hut troops in winter quarters

   3 more examples

   […] commonly the Captaines, after their souldiers are hutted, build Hutts in the place, where their tents stood,

   1631, Samuel Marolois, translated by Henry Hexham, The Art of Fortification, Amsterdam: John Johnson, Part 2, Figure 124 & 125

   […] the scite of the New Town, where divisions of the 17th and 20th light dragoons had hutted themselves.

   1803, Robert Charles Dallas, The History of the Maroons, London: Longman and Rees, Volume 1, Letter 6, p. 200

   His troops, hutted among the heights of Morristown, were half fed, half clothed, and inferior in number to the garrison of New York.

   1850, Washington Irving, chapter 56, in The Life of Washington, volume 2, New York: John W. Lovell, page 443

2. archaicintransitiveTo take shelter in a hut.

   He removed with the troops, on the 19th, to Valley-forge, where they hutted, about sixteen miles from Philadelphia.

   1778, William Gordon, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America, London, Volume 3, Letter 1, p. 11

   1 more example

   1653, Newsletter sent from London to Edward Nicholas dated 17 June, 1653, in William Dunn Macray (ed.), Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869, Volume 2, p. 219, Seven boatfuls of Dutch prisoners have been taken to Chelsea College, where they are to hut under the walls.

3. obsoletetransitiveagricultureTo stack (sheaves of grain).

   The method of endeavouring to save corn in bad harvests, by hutting it in the field, is often practised in the north and west of Scotland,

   1796, James Donaldson, Modern Agriculture; or, The Present State of Husbandry in Great Britain, volume 2, Edinburgh, page 417

1. American footballCalled by the quarterback to prepare the team for a play.

plural HUTs

1. abbreviationacronymbroadcastingAcronym of home/household using television.