slaughterhouse
Americannoun
-
slaughterhouses
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
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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I Survived the Great Chicago Fire, 1871
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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.
See Examples For:
They’re not selling it and sending it to a slaughterhouse.
From Slate ● Jun. 11, 2026
Companies are snapping up Vernon properties and upgrading them, adding advanced cooling systems to old office buildings and filling a shuttered slaughterhouse that once housed hogs, with advanced chips.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 30, 2025
The story “After the Haiku Period,” about batty twin sisters who lay siege to a slaughterhouse, reprises the material.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 14, 2025
The Union Stock Yards in Chicago, the most modern slaughterhouse of the era, opened on Christmas Day in 1865 and marked a turning point for industrial beef production.
From Salon ● Oct. 28, 2024
“Won’t it be easier to jus’ find out where the slaughterhouse is at ’round here?”
From "The Journey of Little Charlie" by Christopher Paul Curtis
There is also evidence that, almost simultaneously, another arm of the federal government was allowing inexpensive wild horses to enter a chain that could end at foreign slaughterhouses.
From Salon ● Aug. 27, 2026
The payments aim to provide a financial safety net for smaller slaughterhouses, which are losing an estimated $300 per head of cattle.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 30, 2026
"In addition to setting up that 20 kilometre zone, we've increased the amount of testing in the slaughterhouses," Muir said.
From BBC ● Dec. 1, 2025
The pair later found employment in slaughterhouses in Nebraska, where she suffered a severe leg injury from a cutting blade.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 28, 2025
When I crossed the river’s northern bend, I avoided glancing at the brownish water churning below, noxious with runoff from the slaughterhouses.
From "The City Beautiful" by Aden Polydoros
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.
