shotgun house
shotgun house noun: a narrow shack with a door at each end, common in the Southern United States from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s.
Noun
shotgun house (plural shotgun houses)
- A narrow shack with a door at each end, common in the Southern United States from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s.
- Dr. King’s words filled the front room of the shotgun house.2019, Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, Fleet, page 25
- Synonyms:
- shotgun, shotgun home, shotgun shack
Synonyms of shotgun house
Forms of shotgun house
| plural | shotgun houses |
|---|
Origin of shotgun house
* New Orleans architectural historian Samuel Wilson, Jr. has suggested that the term alludes to the idea that if all the doors are opened, a shotgun blast fired into the house from the front doorway will fly cleanly to the other end and out at the back. * Folklorist John Michael Vlach has suggested a corruption of a Dahomey Fon area term "to-gun", meaning "place of assembly", brought to New Orleans by Afro-Haitian slaves.
Questions about shotgun house
- What does shotgun house mean?
- Shotgun house means a narrow shack with a door at each end, common in the Southern United States from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s.
- What part of speech is shotgun house?
- Shotgun house is a noun.
- What is the plural of shotgun house?
- The plural of shotgun house is shotgun houses.
Words near shotgun house in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: shotgun 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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “shotgun house.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shotgun_house. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.