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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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
Smithfield Foods SFD 2.24%increase; green up pointing triangle plans to build a large hog slaughterhouse in South Dakota, marking the first new facility built by America’s top pork producer in decades.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 16, 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
This approach would allow the federal government to impose effective regulations where the most serious food safety concerns originate: on the farm and in the slaughterhouse.
From Salon ● Aug. 15, 2024
He must have entered the slaughterhouse with another group of strikebreakers, for he wore the worn denim jeans and collarless shirt of a laborer.
From "The City Beautiful" by Aden Polydoros
Enacting the ban in Providence, he says, was easy: the city already prohibits the building of prisons, incinerators and slaughterhouses.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 15, 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
The link between disdain and action may not form, in the same way that people who don’t like slaughterhouses still eat steak.
From Slate ● Mar. 4, 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
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
