boarding-house
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: boarding-houses
Senses: examples: text: The housemaid at the boarding-house where we have stayed since we left Heathstock is a fat, sonsy, good-natured girl, perfectly ignorant and stupid, but she has not been long in the colony, and seems willing to learn.
ref: 1866 January 24, Mary Anne Barker, “Letter VI”, in Station Life in New Zealand, London: Macmillan & co, published 1870, page 44:
text: The janitor of the College to which I went directed me to a boarding-house, where I engaged a small, third-story room, which I afterwards shared with Mr. Chaucer of Jawjah, as he called the State which he had the honor to represent.
ref: 1867 October, The Atlantic Monthly, volume XX, page 468:
text: Throughout the United States of America, the system of hôtels has taken a peculiar turn. The hôtels are built for the purpose, and usually very large; with few exceptions they are conducted as boarding-houses on the plan of charging so much per diem, everything included excepting liquor, which is obtainable in a large drinking-room called the bar.
ref: 1871, William Chambers, Robert Chambers, “HÔTEL”, in Chambers's Encyclopaedia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the People, volume 5, page 437:
text: Those who come to stay over a month or two invariably abandon the hotels and take to the boarding-houses, where they can live much more comfortably and fare better for half the expense. The charge at these houses ranges from eight to twelve francs per day, including finely-furnished chambers and the use of the parlors, pianos, etc., wine at déjeûner and dinner.
ref: 1874, Charles Carroll Fulton, Europe Viewed through American Spectacles, Philadelphia, Pa.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott & Co., page 153, column 1:
text: 1884, Henry James, "A New England Winter" in The Century Magazine 28 (4–5) (August–September 1884).
The fleshpots were full, under Donald Mesh's roof, and his wife could easily believe that the poor girl would not be in a hurry to return to her boarding-house in Brooklyn.
text: The bibliotaph buries books; not literally, but sometimes with as much effect as if he had put his books underground. There are several varieties of him. The dog-in-the-manger bibliotaph is the worst; he uses his books but little himself, and allows others to use them not at all. On the other hand, a man may be a bibliotaph simply from inability to get at his books. He may be homeless, a bachelor, a denizen of boarding-houses, a wanderer upon the face of the earth.
ref: 1898, Leon H. Vincent, The Bibliotaph And Other People:
text: FOR impersonating an emigrant before the Harbour Master, a foki in an immigration boarding-house at 291 Des Vœux Road, West, was to-day fined $100 and the accountant, and another foki for aiding and abetting, $50 and $25 respectively.
ref: 1905 January 30, Hongkong Telegraph, page 4:
text: Loud voices and a renewed uproar were raised in front of the boarding-house[…] "'Tis Missis Murphy's voice," said Mrs. McCaskey, harking.
ref: 1906, O. Henry, “Between Rounds”, in The Four Million:
text: It’s easy enough to be a beak when you’re young and athletic, and can offer the latest University smattering. The difficulty is to keep your place when you get old and stiff, and younger smatterers are pushing up behind you. Crawl into a boarding-house and you’re safe. A master’s life is frightfully tragic.
ref: 1907, E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey, Part II, XX [Uniform ed., p. 201]
text: About nine o’clock or a little later he got off somewhere near Washington Circle. He went along one of the residence streets there, turned to his left a square or two, and rang a bell. He had been admitted when I got there, but I guessed from the appearance of the place that it was a boarding-house.
ref: 1909, Mary Roberts Rinehart, “At the Boarding-House”, in The Man in Lower Ten, New York, N.Y.: Grosset & Dunlap, →OCLC, page 227:
text: “Oh, stop your carping, Dawn!” I told myself. “You can't expect charming tones, and Oriental do-dads and apple trees in a German boarding-house.”
ref: 1911, Edna Ferber, chapter 6, in Dawn O'Hara, the Girl who Laughed:
text: Bodies were always a nuisance -- even the small guinea-pig bodies from the slight clandestine experiments in West’s room at the boarding-house.
ref: 1922, H. P. Lovecraft, Herbert West: Reanimator:
text: Further on, blatantly advertising its meritorious solidity, a boarding-house exhibits behind uncurtained windows its testimony to the soundness of London.
ref: 1922 October 26, Virginia Woolf, chapter 6, in Jacob’s Room, Richmond, London: […] Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, →OCLC; republished London: The Hogarth Press, 1960, →OCLC:
text: Yet Clacton, like every other station at a big seaside resort, is bedevilled by the traditional insistence of boarding-house landladies that their clients must arrive on Saturday before lunch and leave on Saturday after breakfast.
ref: 1959 April, B. Perren, “The Essex Coast Branches of the Great Eastern Line”, in Trains Illustrated, page 191:
text: 2005, Andrew Loman, "Somewhat on the Community-System": Representations of Fourierism in the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), page xxiv,
When Hollingsworth and Priscilla retreat to a cottage at the end of the novel, they are spurning not only reformatories and phalansteries but also boarding-houses, tenements, and hotels.
text: “[…]It′s some kind of boarding-house that she kipsies in—”
ref: 2007, Pip Wilson, Faces in the Street: Louisa and Henry Lawson and the Castlereagh Street Push, page 155:
glosses: Alternative form of boarding house.