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flophouse

noun

  1. place with cheap lodging
L320771 on Wikidata ↗

Wiktionary

Pronunciation: /ˈflɒphaʊs/

noun

Etymology: From flop + house, originally hobo slang, presumably from slang flop (“lie down to sleep”).

  1. A cheap hotel or boarding house where many people sleep in large rooms.

    In one of [Cincinnati’s] slum districts stands the Silver Moon, a “flop house” (i.e., a house where the occupants are “flopped” out of their hanging bunks by letting down the ropes).

    We even visited some drunken seamen in a flophouse on Mission Street that she knew; they offered us whisky.

verb

Etymology: From flop + house, originally hobo slang, presumably from slang flop (“lie down to sleep”).

  1. To stay in a flophouse.

    August was aware of Robert's strange quirk of flophousing away from home and that he often spent weekends at the Diana.

    I kept going nowhere, bummed the country, boxcar'd it, breadlined it, flophoused it, that cruddy dying by inches in jungles when, Christ-o, outa the knocked-out black and blue I'm told I gotta go to war, gotta fight for freedom.