workhouse

plural workhouses · alternative work house

1. UKhistoricalAn institution for homeless poor people funded by the local parish, where the able-bodied were required to work.

   "I don't want to spoil any comparison you are going to make," said Jim, "but I was at Winchester and New College." / "That will do," said Mackenzie. "I was dragged up at the workhouse school till I was twelve.[…]"

   1909 September 9, Archibald Marshall [pseudonym; Arthur Hammond Marshall], chapter II, in The Squire’s Daughter, London: Methuen & Co. […], →OCLC

   2 more examples

   Among other public buildings in a certain town which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, it boasts of one which is common to most towns, great or small, to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born, […] the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.

   1838, Boz [pseudonym; Charles Dickens], chapter I, in Oliver Twist; […], volume (please specify |volume=I, II, or III), London: Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC

   The New Poor Law of 1834, a statute of quite uncommon callousness, gave [to the labourer] poor relief only within the new workhouses (where he had to seperate from wife and child to discourage the sentimental and unmalthusian habit of thoughtless procreation) and withdrawing the parish guarantee of a minimum livelihood.

   1962, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolutions. 1789-1848, page 167

   Synonyms: bastille, poorhouse

2. USA prison in which the sentence includes manual labour.
3. archaicA place of manufacture; a factory.

   He carefully guarded his secret, but it got out, and, when he had his invention almost completed, some men broke open his workhouse and carried it away. It was afterward returned, but his plan had been copied, and from the copy many machines were made.

   1895, Will H. Glascock, Stories of Columbia, page 190

present singular third person workhouses · participle present workhousing · participle past workhoused · past workhoused · alternative work house

1. UKhistoricaltransitiveTo place (a person) in the workhouse (institution for the poor).