Noun
lodging-house (plural lodging-houses)
- Alternative form of lodging house.
1851, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, volume 1, page 217:After some altercation with the "mot" of the "ken" (mistress of the lodging-house) about the cleanliness of a knife or fork, my new acquaintance began to arrange "ground," &c., for the night's work.
1853, Charles Dickens, editor, Household Words, volume 21, page 64:A successful Australian digger — successful, not merely in siftings and washings, but bearing the title, and its best credentials, of a “nuggetter” − came down from Forest Creek recently and took up his abode in a low lodging-house in Little Bourke Street, Melbourne.
1859, Snowden's Magistrates Assistant, page 87:[…] going about the county half-naked, but having good clothes, perhaps sent forward to the lodging-house by his jomer (girl); this is very often a profitable trade; the shallow-cove of course selling all the clothes he does not need himself.
1891, Thomas Hardy, chapter LV, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented […], volume III, London: James R[ipley] Osgood, McIlvaine and Co., […], →OCLC, phase the seventh (Fulfilment), page 234:“That’s it!” cried Clare, pleased to think that she had reverted to the real pronunciation. “What place is The Herons?”
“A stylish lodging-house. ’Tis all lodging-houses here, bless ’ee.”
1899, Josiah Flynt, Tramping with Tramps, New York: Century, published 1901, Part 1, Chapter 6, p. 146, footnote 1:In Germany and England the tramps usually eat their set-downs in cheap restaurants or at lodging-houses.
- 1908, O. Henry, “The Shocks of Doom” in The Voice of The City: Further Stories of the Four Million, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1914, pp. 96-7,
- He was either young or old; cheap lodging-houses had flavored him mustily; razors and combs had passed him by; in him drink had been bottled and sealed in the devil’s bond.
2002, Meg Arnot, Cornelie Usborne, Gender And Crime in Modern Europe, page 82:A boy called Hewitt, awaiting transportation on the Euryalus hulk in the mid-1830s, told an interviewer that the swell-mob would often call into lodging-houses in order to recruit "go-alongs" for thieving expeditions: "boys are delighted [they] think it an honour to go with a swell-mob".