post house
- noun
- Archaic
:
posada
- Travelers often stopped at the post house to rest and exchange their tired horses for fresh ones.
Examples
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The old post house at the edge of the village now serves as a museum.
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The old post house was a popular stop for travelers.
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In eighteenth-century Europe, the fastest mail traveled from post house to post house across the countryside.
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Did you see the post house on the way?
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In eighteenth-century Europe, the fastest mail traveled from post house to post house across the countryside.
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Travelers often stopped at the post house to rest and exchange their tired horses for fresh ones.
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The old post house at the edge of the village now serves as a museum.
Synonyms
An inn where people changed horses and rested on old mail routes
Surface Forms
Morphology
post + house
The element 'house' is transparent, but the specific historical sense of 'post' as a relay/station for horses and travelers is archaic and not given in the provided word entry. A B1 learner who knows 'post' only as mail or 'post' in a modern sense would not reliably infer the specialised function (horse exchange/inn), so the compound is partly predictable as a house related to the post but not fully predictable in its historical meaning.
Etymology
Post house comes from old mail travel: it was a roadside inn where tired post horses were kept and changed so messages and travelers could move quickly. That's why post house came to mean a place where people could rest and exchange horses.
