flophouse
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English
[edit]![](http://178.128.105.246/content-http-upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Bunks_in_a_Seven-Cent_Lodging-House%2C_Pell_Street.jpeg/170px-Bunks_in_a_Seven-Cent_Lodging-House%2C_Pell_Street.jpeg)
Alternative forms
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From flop + house, originally hobo slang, presumably from slang flop (“lie down to sleep”).[1]
Pronunciation
[edit]- (UK) IPA(key): /ˈflɒphaʊs/
Audio (General Australian): (file)
Noun
[edit]flophouse (plural flophouses)
- (US, slang) A cheap hotel or boarding house where many people sleep in large rooms. [from 20th c.]
- 1904, McClure’s Magazine, November 1904:[1]
- In one of [Cincinnati’s] slum districts stands the Silver Moon, a “flop house” (i.e., a house where the occupants are “flopped” out of their hanging bunks by letting down the ropes).
- 1957, Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Viking Press, →OCLC:
- We even visited some drunken seamen in a flophouse on Mission Street that she knew; they offered us whisky.
- 1982, TC Boyle, Water Music, Penguin, published 2006, page 34:
- He was born out back of a twopenny flophouse in what the wags called “The Holy Land” […].
- 1904, McClure’s Magazine, November 1904:[1]
Synonyms
[edit]Hypernyms
[edit]Related terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]cheap hotel — see doss-house
Verb
[edit]flophouse (third-person singular simple present flophouses, present participle flophousing, simple past and past participle flophoused)
- To stay in a flophouse.
- 1941, James F. Waters, The Court of Missing Heirs, page 53:
- August was aware of Robert's strange quirk of flophousing away from home and that he often spent weekends at the Diana.
- 1960, Alan Kapelner, All the naked heroes: a novel, page 337:
- I kept going nowhere, bummed the country, boxcar'd it, breadlined it, flophoused it, that cruddy dying by inches in jungles when, Christ-o, outa the knocked-out black and blue I'm told I gotta go to war, gotta fight for freedom.
- 1989, S. Prideaux, Fine Arts, page 202:
- For old time's sake we plan to flophouse with you over the parturient period.
References
[edit]- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Douglas Harper (2001–2024) “flophouse”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.