WORKHOUSE

Workhouse

In England and Wales a workhouse, colloquially known as a spike, was a place where those unable to support themselves were offered accommodation and employment. The earliest known use of the term dates from 1631, in an account by the mayor of Abingdon reporting that "wee haue erected wthn our borough a workehouse to sett poore people to worke".

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workhouse

Noun

  1. formerly, an institution for the poor homeless, funded by the local parish where the able-bodied were required to work.
  2. a prison in which the sentence includes manual labour.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: workhouse
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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