shotgun house
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
English
[edit]![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f1/BayouStJohnHeartMarkTires.jpg/220px-BayouStJohnHeartMarkTires.jpg)
Etymology
[edit]- New Orleans architectural historian Samuel Wilson, Jr. has suggested that the term alludes to the idea that if all the doors are opened, a shotgun blast fired into the house from the front doorway will fly cleanly to the other end and out at the back.
- Folklorist John Michael Vlach has suggested a corruption of a Dahomey Fon area term "to-gun", meaning "place of assembly", brought to New Orleans by Afro-Haitian slaves.
Noun
[edit]shotgun house (plural shotgun houses)
- A narrow shack with a door at each end, common in the Southern United States from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s.
- Synonyms: shotgun, shotgun shack
- 2019, Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, Fleet, page 25:
- Dr. King’s words filled the front room of the shotgun house.
Further reading
[edit]shotgun house on Wikipedia.Wikipedia