house of office
house of office noun: an outhouse: an outbuilding used as a lavatory.
Noun
house of office (plural houses of office)
- An outhouse: an outbuilding used as a lavatory.
- Going down my cellar to look, I put my foot into a heap of turds, by which I find that Mr Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me; but I will have it helped.1660 20 October, Samuel Pepys, diary
- I never, since I left England, till now, have regal'd Myself with a good house of Office... the holes in Germany are... too round, chiefly owing... to the broader bottoms of the Germans.1764 August 5, David Garrick, letter
- Synonyms:
- bathroom
Synonyms of house of office
Forms of house of office
| plural | houses of office |
|---|
Origin of house of office
From the mostly archaic sense of office as a "duty" or "function" and hence unmentionable "bodily functions".
Questions about house of office
- What does house of office mean?
- House of office means an outhouse: an outbuilding used as a lavatory.
- What part of speech is house of office?
- House of office is a noun.
- What is the plural of house of office?
- The plural of house of office is houses of office.
Words near house of office in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: house of office (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “house of office.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/house_of_office. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.