blockhouse
Americannoun
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Military. a fortified structure with ports or loopholes through which defenders may direct gunfire.
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Also called garrison house. (formerly) a building, usually of hewn timber and with a projecting upper story, having loopholes for musketry.
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a house built of squared logs.
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Rocketry. a structure near a launching site for rockets, generally made of heavily reinforced concrete, for housing and protecting personnel, electronic controls, and auxiliary apparatus before and during launching operations.
noun
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(formerly) a wooden fortification with ports or loopholes for defensive fire, observation, etc
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a concrete structure strengthened to give protection against enemy fire, with apertures to allow defensive gunfire
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a building constructed of logs or squared timber
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a reinforced concrete building close to a rocket-launching site for protecting personnel and equipment during launching
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of blockhouse
1505–15; < Middle Dutch blochuus, equivalent to bloc block + huus house
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.
See Examples For:
Pte Malcolm, a stretcher bearer, was found when unidentified remains were recovered from a shell hole outside a German blockhouse in Fusilier Wood, near Klein-Zillebeke, Belgium.
From BBC ● May 10, 2023
Others are posing on the porch of an officer’s house and in front of the blockhouse, which are still on the property.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 25, 2023
On the other side of the draw was a similar position and further inland above the exit from the beach was another concrete blockhouse with its 88-gun pointing down the approach.
From Fox News ● Jun. 3, 2019
By one p.m. they were strapped into their couches, familiar from hours spent in vacuum-chamber tests in Houston, and Slayton left for the blockhouse, where he would monitor the test.
From Salon ● Mar. 24, 2019
I looked through the blockhouse portal before beginning the first countdown and saw Miss Riley sitting at the Women’s Club table.
From "October Sky" by Homer Hickam
It’s a sure sign that greed, not fear, is the current phase of the arc of Mr. McWilliams’s pendulum that nobody can be sure whether these digital blockhouses will ever generate a dollar of profit.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 12, 2025
Beyond the beach rise the bluffs where the Germans built their first line of defenses with trenches and blockhouses.
From Seattle Times ● Jun. 4, 2019
We passed dilapidated blockhouses, children taking bucket baths, and old women spreading rice over tattered tarpaulins to dry.
From The New Yorker ● Jan. 12, 2015
Climb any hill and you may well find pillboxes, bunkers, blockhouses; stroll through any freshly plowed field and you might just spot shrapnel, cartridges and bullets atop the furrows.
From New York Times ● Aug. 21, 2014
There were five forts, having each four quadrangular blockhouses, with a barrack in the centre; these were connected by wooden palisades or pickets.
From History of Halifax City by Akins, Thomas B.
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.
