sickhouse
sickhouse noun: a place where sick or injured people are cared for; a hospital.
Noun
sickhouse (plural sickhouses)
- A place where sick or injured people are cared for; a hospital.
- The sickhouse was a cool, capacious, and convenient building, well adapted to the purpose for which it was used.1830, Frederic William Naylor Bayley, Four years' residence in the West Indies
- What was still called the new sickhouse, where people were taken to be tended if their illness was contagious, […]1993, Robert Jordan, The shadow rising
- Synonyms:
- infirmary
Synonyms of sickhouse
Forms of sickhouse
| plural | sickhouses |
|---|
Origin of sickhouse
From Middle English sykhous, sek hous (“hospital”, literally “the house for the sick”), equivalent to sick + house. Cognate with Dutch ziekenhuis (“hospital”), German Low German Süükhuus, Sükenhuus (“hospital”), Norwegian sykehus (“hospital”), German Siechhaus, Siechenhaus (“infirmary”), Danish sygehus (“hospital”), Swedish sjukhus (“hospital”), Icelandic sjúkrahús (“hospital”), West Frisian sikehûs (“hospital”). Compare also German Krankenhaus (“hospital”), Saterland Frisian Kroankenhuus (“hospital”), and Old English lǣċehūs (“hospital”).
Questions about sickhouse
- What does sickhouse mean?
- Sickhouse means a place where sick or injured people are cared for; a hospital.
- What part of speech is sickhouse?
- Sickhouse is a noun.
- What is the plural of sickhouse?
- The plural of sickhouse is sickhouses.
Words near sickhouse in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: sickhouse (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: “sickhouse.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sickhouse. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.