shotgun shack
1
8.3
- noun
- /ˈʃɑtˌɡʌn ʃæk/
- US
:
casa de un solo piso
- Our house was just an overgrown shotgun shack, set back from the street in the middle of a dusty red yard.
Examples
-
Sitting in a chair at my grandmother's kitchen table, my knees jerking up and down like the needle on her sewing machine, I made the windows in her shotgun shack in Georgia rattle in their frames.
Academic text (2002) -
The weedy lots and shotgun shacks in full sight of glitzy skyscrapers, the booms and the busts, also suggested the Third World.
Academic text (2004) -
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
-
From the shotgun shack to the Superdome.
Blog text (29) -
At the far edge of the field stood a water-stained shotgun shack.
Fiction book (1998) -
I know as Mother drives Ora down the dirt road past the familiar shotgun shacks, past houses covered.
Fiction book (2000) -
This house, this home, her all-her-life home, forty-seven years in a shotgun shack.
Fiction book (1995) -
Up in the city's Lakeview section, where modest shotgun shacks give way to more upscale brick and stone houses, the ratio is reversed; most of the homes have been or are being repaired.
Academic text (2007) -
At the far edge of the field stood a water-stained shotgun shack.
-
Our house was just an overgrown shotgun shack, set back from the street in the middle of a dusty red yard.
Synonyms
131
1.8
A small rough shelter made from wood and metal scraps
How Narrow
- US
1
8.3
∞
1.0
Surface Forms
Morphology
shotgun + shack
Although 'shack' denotes a basic shelter and 'shotgun' refers to a firearm, those literal meanings do not transparently produce the specific architectural sense of a narrow, single‑story house with rooms arranged one behind another. The term is regionally specific and historically motivated (e.g., folk etymologies about the line of fire), so a B1 learner who only knows the constituent words would not reliably infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Shotgun shack comes from a simple image: in some old, narrow houses the rooms were arranged one behind another, and one popular story says you could fire a shotgun at the front door and the shot would go straight out the back door. So shotgun shack means 'a narrow, single-story house with rooms one behind another'.