mort-house

Noun

morthouse (plural morthouses)

1. A specialised secure building usually located in a churchyard where bodies were temporarily interred before a formal funeral took place.
   • That the bodies of all persons dying in these towns, and, if need be, in all other towns, and also in country parishes, unclaimable by immediate relatives, or whose relatives decline to defray the expenses of interment, shall be conveyed to a morthouse appointed in the said towns for their...1828 April 8, William Mackenzie, “Anatomical Dissections. An Appeal to the Public and to the Legislature, on the necessity of affording Dead Bodies to the Schools of Anatomy, by Legislative...