- 1（英國舊時的）濟貧院、貧民習藝所
A workhouse was a building in Britain, mostly in the 1800s, where very poor people went when they had nothing left — no money, no food, nowhere to live. In return for a bed and meals, they had to work, often at dull, hard tasks like breaking stones or picking apart old rope. Conditions were deliberately made hard, because the thinking of the time was that the workhouse should be worse than any paid job, so that nobody would enter unless they truly had to. Families were split up on arrival: men, women, and children slept in separate parts. Because of this, the word carries real fear and shame in English, and that feeling still to it. It appears constantly in Victorian novels — Oliver Twist opens in one — and in English it stands as a symbol of the harshest treatment of the poor. You will meet it in history lessons, in novels, and in political arguments as an insult: someone may say a new policy is "a return to the workhouse." It is a historical word: modern Britain has none. In American English the older, similar word is poorhouse.
組成work + house — a house where you had to work. The compound is very old: Middle English werkhous, from Old English weorchūs, which meant a workshop, a place where things were made. The "place for the poor" meaning came later.
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
workhousenoun
- 1
historicalAn institution for homeless poor people funded by the local parish, where the able-bodied were required to work.
- Among other public buildings in a certain town which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, it boasts of one which is common to most towns, great or small, to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born, […] the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.
- "I don't want to spoil any comparison you are going to make," said Jim, "but I was at Winchester and New College." / "That will do," said Mackenzie. "I was dragged up at the workhouse school till I was twelve.[…]"
- 2
A prison in which the sentence includes manual labour.
- 3
archaicA place of manufacture; a factory.
- He carefully guarded his secret, but it got out, and, when he had his invention almost completed, some men broke open his workhouse and carried it away. It was afterward returned, but his plan had been copied, and from the copy many machines were made.
workhouseverb
- 1
historicalTo place (a person) in the workhouse (institution for the poor).
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。