Word.ws English Dictionary

orphan house

orphan house noun: an orphanage.

orphan house: an orphanage
Image: lzurowski, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

orphan house (plural orphan houses)

  1. An orphanage.
  2. (Pittsburgh) Residential dwellings that have no direct vehicular road access and can only be reached via the city’s extensive, steep public stairways; often dating from the early 1900s.
    • As you walk west along Fairview, you may see a set of nice looking stairs at the end of Valonia St. to your left. However, while these do lead down to one of the "orphan" houses that is accessible only via steps, further down the staircase is impassable.2025 June 15, Charleen, “West End Overlook to Chaykhana: A Pittsburgh Steps & Dine Hike”, in Love to Chow, archived from the original on 10 Nov 2025

Forms of orphan house

pluralorphan houses
alternative formorphaned house

Questions about orphan house

What does orphan house mean?
Orphan house means an orphanage.
What part of speech is orphan house?
Orphan house is a noun.
What is the plural of orphan house?
The plural of orphan house is orphan houses.

Words near orphan house in the dictionary

  1. orphan crushing machines
  2. orphan disease
  3. orphan diseases
  4. orphan drug
  5. orphan drugs
  6. orphan house
  7. orphan houses
  8. orphan initialism
  9. orphan initialisms
  10. orphan John
  11. orphan medicine

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: orphan house (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: “orphan house.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/orphan_house. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.