hothouse
Part of speech: noun
verb
Morphological type: compound
Topics: climatology
natural-sciences
Etymology: From Middle English hothous, equivalent to hot + house.
Compound parts: hot
house
Inflected forms:
form: hothouses
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: hot-house
pos: noun
tags: alternative
form: hothouses
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: hothousing
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: hothoused
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: hothoused
pos: verb
tags: past
form: hot-house
pos: verb
tags: alternative
Senses:
gloss: A heated greenhouse.
pos: noun
gloss: An environment in which growth or development is encouraged naturally or artificially; a hotbed.
pos: noun
tags: figuratively
examples: This had given him the strength to leave cadet school at seventeen and volunteer for active service, reach the rank of second lieutenant no later than his hothouse-bred contemporaries, begin his military studies in the General Staff Academy itself, and, still only twenty-five, graduate not only with top marks but with promotion out of turn for special excellence in military science.
In 1906 and 1907 defeat was not yet total, society was still on the boil, spinning around the rim of the maelstrom. Lenin had sat in Kuokkala, waiting in vain for the second wave. But from 1908, when the reactionary rabble had tightened its grip on the whole of Russia, the underground had shriveled to nothing, the workers had swarmed like ants out of their holes and into legal bodies—trade unions and insurance associations—and the decline of the underground had sapped the vitality of the emigration too, reduced it to a hothouse existence. Back there was the Duma, a legal press—and every émigré was eager to publish there.
A seed had been planted in Gillies's mind—and as he took up his next assignment, it would be nurtured in the brutal hothouse of frontline surgery.
gloss: An environment full of conflict or plots.
pos: noun
examples: As with much of Carsley's reign, England entered this Athens hothouse with sub-plots in the background, this time the nine withdrawals from the squad which was met with a critical public response from the normally strictly-on-message captain Harry Kane.
gloss: A bagnio, or bathing house; a brothel.
pos: noun
tags: obsolete
examples: Let a man ſweat once a weeke in a Hothouſe, and be well rubd and froted with a good plumpe juicie wench, and ſweet linnen, he ſhall ne’re ha’ the Poxe.
and now she professes a / hot-house, which I think is a very ill house too.
gloss: A heated room for drying greenware.
pos: noun
gloss: A hot state in global climate.
pos: noun
examples: Kruban is a tidally-locked Venusian hothouse, its surface perpetually obscured by clouds of sulfur and carbon dioxides.
gloss: To provide (a child) with an enriched environment with the aim of stimulating academic development.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: she had such an exceptional grasp of maths in her first two years at the school theyʼd been hothousing her to sit her GCSE Maths two years early
Related words: greenhouse
icehouse
Derived words: hothouse effect
hothouse flower
Translations:
lang: Bulgarian
word: разсадник
roman: razsadnik
lang: Finnish
word: hautomo
lang: French
word: vivier
lang: German
word: Treibhaus
lang: German
word: förderliche Umgebung
lang: Hungarian
word: táptalaj