slaughterhouse
Americannoun
plural
slaughterhousesnoun
Etymology
Origin of slaughterhouse
Explanation
A slaughterhouse is where animals are killed so they can be used for meat. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle exposes the unsafe working conditions of a slaughterhouse in Chicago. Good times. Not. In order for people to eat meat, animals have to be slaughtered, or killed, and the place where this happens on a large scale is a slaughterhouse. Sometimes it's also called an abattoir. The word stems from a Scandinavian root and is related to the Old Norseslatr, "a butchering." The word slaughterhouse can also refer to a violent situation. In Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Slaughterhouse Five," war prisoners are housed in an abandoned slaughterhouse, which is also a metaphor for war itself.
Vocabulary lists containing slaughterhouse
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Slaughterhouse animals have provided most bilirubin for research, but this source contains three slightly different varieties of bilirubin and is not suitable for therapies, Kim says.
From Science Magazine • Jun. 8, 2023
This clause was essentially stripped out of the constitution very early on in 1873 in a case called the Slaughterhouse Cases.
From Slate • Apr. 12, 2022
But the problem was that even during Reconstruction, in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Supreme Court said that almost all of what people considered their basic rights still remained under the states.
From The New Yorker • Sep. 9, 2019
Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese territory, confirmed its first case of African swine fever last week at the Sheung Shui Slaughterhouse, which gets its pigs from the Chinese mainland.
From New York Times • May 14, 2019
She did not even observe that the Slaughterhouse Quartette looked at her unanimously, with languid interest from out the wreaths of smoke they had created.
From Prudence of the Parsonage by Hueston, Ethel
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
