boarding house
- noun
- /ˈbɔrdɪŋ haʊs/
- Archaic
- So Rufe and I got rooms in a boarding house and agreed to meet that afternoon at the circus.
- live in a boarding house
- women in a boarding house
- German boarding house
So the school and we were all in boarding houses.
- So the school and we were all in boarding houses.
- What you need to check out is the boarding, the home, the, the boarding house that Lee Harvey was at.
Examples
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Someone at the boarding house must have turned them in.
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Along with some other nostalgics from the provinces, we both lived in a boarding house near the university.
Fiction book (1996) -
You know, we were lucky to find a boarding house.
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I was living in a boarding house then.
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Not a hotel, more like a boarding house.
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Now that the boarding house is an actual house, there is more work for everyone.
Fiction book (2001) -
In the beginning, they were happy, and they met at her boarding house whenever they had time.
Academic text (2006) -
I left them in my coat pocket in the boarding house where I'm staying.
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So he moved down to Elkton, in Maryland, and took a room in a boarding house.
Fiction book (1998) -
She found a cozy boarding house where meals were included in the rent.
Synonyms
A cheap place for travelers or students to sleep, often with shared rooms and facilities
A small building near a house where visitors stay
A house where people rent single rooms and share bathrooms or a kitchen
A house where people pay to live and get meals
A house that rents rooms to people for short or long stays
Temporary rooms you rent to stay in for a short time
A building that offers rooms for people to stay for a short time
How Comfortable
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is compositional: 'board' (to provide or receive lodging/meals) combined with 'house' (a building) directly yields a house where boarding is offered. This compound follows common English noun-formation patterns and similar constructions exist cross-linguistically, so a B1 learner who knows the constituents can readily infer the meaning.
Etymology
Boarding house comes from the old use of board to mean 'meals' or the table where people ate. So a boarding house was a house where people paid to stay and were given meals, which is why it means a place that provides rooms and food today.