Refine this word faster
Halfway house
Definitions
- 1 A temporary residence for those who have left prison, residential drug rehabilitation, or the like, designed to ease them back into society.
"She added that Van Houten will head to a halfway house for about a year after her release."
- 2 A halfway point towards achieving a goal. figuratively
"I consider the establishment and success of their government [i.e., the French revolutionaries' government] as necessary to stay up our own and to prevent it from falling back to that kind of Halfway-house, the English constitution."
- 3 An inn reached about midway through a journey. literally
"At last parted, and my wife and I by coach to the Opera […] Thence to Tower-wharf, and there took boat, and we all walked to Halfeway House,² and there eat and drank, and were pleasant, and so finally home again in the evening, and so good night, this being a very pleasant life that we now lead, and have long done; the Lord be blessed, and make us thankful. But, though I am much against too much spending, yet I do think it best to enjoy some degree of pleasure now that we have health, money, and opportunity, rather than to leave pleasures to old age or poverty, when we cannot have them so properly. [Footnote in 1893] ²The Halfway House, Rotherhithe, was a place of entertainment frequently visited by Pepys on his way to Deptford, towards which it was a halfway house."
- 4 Any place of calm and respite reached during a journey. figuratively
"Even to-day Zakro is still the principal half-way house for sailing craft between the Ægean and the north coast of Africa."
Etymology
The term in its original sense (the literal one) was clearly already a well-established term when Samuel Pepys mentioned a prominent example in his diary in 1662.
See also for "halfway house"
Next best steps
Mini challenge
Unscramble this word: halfwayhouse