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say it: POOR-hows
poorhouse is a noun meaning "an establishment maintained at public expense in order to provide housing for the poor and homeless". It carries one recorded sense.
an establishment maintained at public expense in order to provide housing for the poor and homeless
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for poorhouse come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.