charnel house

See synonyms for charnel house on Thesaurus.com
noun
  1. a house or place in which the bodies or bones of the dead are deposited.

Origin of charnel house

1
First recorded in 1550–60

Words Nearby charnel house

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2024

How to use charnel house in a sentence

  • If I think about it for a moment, there are obviously lots of policy implications of Gosnell's baby charnel house.

  • The factory had indeed become a charnel-house, it being useless for the chiefs to admonish their men to keep under cover.

    Rule of the Monk | Giuseppe Garibaldi
  • Its door an entrance to a living charnel-house, its iron-barred windows but the outlook of hell!

    The Boys of '61 | Charles Carleton Coffin.
  • I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel-house of our civilization.

  • The spectacle now under their eyes was itself sufficiently disagreeable, seeming a very charnel-house.

    The Vee-Boers | Mayne Reid
  • The bright world had become a place of skulls, a charnel house, a prison whose iron walls were closing in on him eternally.

British Dictionary definitions for charnel house

charnel house

noun
  1. (esp formerly) a building or vault where corpses or bones are deposited

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012