morthouse
morthouse noun: a specialised secure building usually located in a churchyard where bodies were temporarily interred before a formal funeral took place.
Noun
morthouse (plural morthouses)
- 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...
- Morthouses were sturdily built, with iron linings on wooden doors, even a skin of steel within the whole structure in some cases.1989, Dane Love, Scottish Kirkyards, London: Robert Hale, →ISBN, page 154
Forms of morthouse
| plural | morthouses |
|---|---|
| alternative form | mort house |
| alternative form | mort-house |
Origin of morthouse
From mort (“death”) + house. Compare mort bell, mort cloth, mort stone.
Questions about morthouse
- What does morthouse mean?
- Morthouse means a specialised secure building usually located in a churchyard where bodies were temporarily interred before a formal funeral took place.
- What part of speech is morthouse?
- Morthouse is a noun.
- What is the plural of morthouse?
- The plural of morthouse is morthouses.
Words near morthouse in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: morthouse (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.
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Cite this entry: “morthouse.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/morthouse. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.