Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Plural form of workhouse.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.

    The Kiltartan Poetry Book: Prose Translations from the Irish 1919

  • For the nation erects huge buildings falsely called workhouses, tremendous institutions called prisons.

    London's Underworld Thomas Holmes 1882

  • Capping housing benefit is NOT condemning people to "workhouses" or "attacking the poor".

    The Guardian World News Paul Owen 2010

  • 1834: The Poor Law Amendment Act is passed, introducing 'workhouses' for the healthy poor.

    Why Now? 2010

  • More often, judges sent convicted prostitutes to county workhouses.

    A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010

  • Arrests for streetwalking “skyrocketed across the nation,” and most of the arrested women were sent to reformatories and workhouses.

    A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010

  • The building is one of only three surviving Georgian workhouses in London, and has close ties to the Victorian social reformer Joseph Rogers, the workhouse's medical officer, who fought for improvements including separate infirmaries for the workhouse's many sick residents.

    Please, sir, save workhouse tied to 'Oliver Twist,' Britain asked 2011

  • The unrelenting work ethic in such institutions was a lingering relic of the workhouses, where Romford-based Bill Golding – also interviewed by Jamelia in the programme – was sent at the age of three with his unmarried mother Ida, in 1924, after her family rejected her.

    Jamelia: Respect for single mothers! 2011

  • The workhouses have no space left in which to pack the starving crowds who are craving every day and night at their doors for food and shelter.

    Jack London: The People of The Abyss 2010

  • So, week by week, we travelled through the mills, workhouses and lodging rooms of urbanising England; the accounts of effluent-bubbling streams, smog-laden skies and overcrowded tenements.

    If we have no history, we have no future | Tristram Hunt 2011

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