How to Use workhouse in a Sentence

workhouse

noun
  • Dom is a workhouse, a great athlete and a great lacrosse player.
    — Sean Begin, courant.com, 10 June 2017
  • Looking to buy your first Dutch oven or upgrade this kitchen workhouse?
    — Becca Miller, Good Housekeeping, 20 July 2022
  • He was convicted and sentenced to four months of service in a workhouse.
    — Osita Nwanevu, The New Republic, 23 Sep. 2019
  • The wooden workhouse structure that the first suffragists were held in no longer stands.
    — Alli Hartley-Kong, Smithsonian Magazine, 26 Oct. 2020
  • Jordan Niles was a workhouse on the drive with 10 carries in the drive for 62 yards.
    — Gary Curreri, sun-sentinel.com, 29 Nov. 2019
  • The boy who gets the prosthetic finger is left at the workhouse because his family can no longer afford him.
    — Jesse Green, New York Times, 5 Feb. 2025
  • Once feeding time is finished, this workhouse wonder can serve as a stroller blanket or generously sized scarf.
    — Pamela Brill, Parents, 22 May 2025
  • The workhouse, rather than being a safety net, was an exemplary punishment.
    — Dominic Green, WSJ, 22 Apr. 2022
  • On closer investigation, Snow learned the workhouse had its own pump.
    — Deirdre Mask, Time, 14 Apr. 2020
  • Not long after the workhouse was built in 1868, the public burials began.
    — John Hirschauer, National Review, 28 Apr. 2020
  • Would a frontrunner have faded with fatigue, while a workhouse like Lynn got stronger as the season progressed?
    — Bob Nightengale, USA TODAY, 15 Sep. 2020
  • So a magistrate dismissed the charges but sentenced both Black men to 90 days in the workhouse for vagrancy.
    — Equal Justice Initiative, USA Today, 6 Nov. 2025
  • County jails and workhouses are a different matter.
    — Mara H. Gottfried, Twin Cities, 16 Jan. 2026
  • On August 17, six women were sentenced to month-long confinements at the workhouse.
    — National Geographic, 13 Aug. 2020
  • The former should be supported, it was thought, but the latter had to be punished (say, by being put in a workhouse) or simply abandoned to their fate.
    — Pierre Rosanvallon, Foreign Affairs, 14 Dec. 2015
  • This stainless steel workhouse includes a steam wand for frothing milk, an automatic flow stop and memory function for cup volume.
    — Madeleine Marr, miamiherald, 1 Sep. 2017
  • His memoir told of workhouse guards beating prisoners on the least pretense, and of one guard who regularly shoved prisoners down flights of stairs.
    — Equal Justice Initiative, USA Today, 6 Nov. 2025
  • One insisted really on a type of solitary confinement for people who had been convicted of crimes and the other looked more like a workhouse.
    — Henry Gass, The Christian Science Monitor, 3 Aug. 2020
  • For the suffragists, the humiliation of the workhouse was not only unjust arrest.
    — Alli Hartley-Kong, Smithsonian Magazine, 26 Oct. 2020
  • As a result of these efforts, workhouse nursing reforms gradually spread across England.
    — Melissa Pritchard, Discover Magazine, 24 May 2024
  • Despite its lofty ideals, the Industrial School proved to be little more than a harsh workhouse, whose real purpose was to keep troubled youths out of sight.
    — Gary Kamiya, San Francisco Chronicle, 16 Mar. 2018
  • These human stories unfold against a backdrop of enormous human suffering in the prisons, workhouses, brothels and streets.
    — Pam Kragen, San Diego Union-Tribune, 1 Oct. 2023
  • Housed in a former workhouse in Shoreditch, in a time where most of us who are lucky enough to have their own homes, have thought about them and their place in our lives, its reopening couldn’t be more timely.
    — Sarah Turner, Forbes, 28 May 2021
  • As the workhouse of the world, China has borne the brunt of environmental costs that accompanied the rise of consumerism in the West and, now, at home.
    — Eamon Barrett, Fortune, 1 Oct. 2019
  • He was sentenced to 10 months in the workhouse, and resigned from the Children’s Theatre Company.
    — Michelle Griffith, Twin Cities, 2 Nov. 2019
  • Offenders sentenced to a year or less typically serve their sentences at the workhouse, and the county has slashed admissions to its workhouse programs by nearly half over the decade.
    — Shannon Prather, Star Tribune, 28 Nov. 2020
  • In December 1964, Bruce was sentenced to four months in a workhouse, but was released on bail through the appeals process, per his website.
    — Olivia Evans, Women's Health, 13 Apr. 2023
  • In one case, the magistrate sent a white woman to the workhouse for 60 days for having been arrested at a Hill saloon in the company of Black men.
    — Equal Justice Initiative, USA Today, 6 Nov. 2025
  • In October, a judge stayed a 364-day sentence to the Hennepin County workhouse for two years and put him on probation.
    — Nick Ferraro, Twin Cities, 17 Jan. 2024
  • In another excavation area on the grounds, seven sets of historic skeletal remains consistent with the workhouse era have now been recovered in total, the agency said.
    — Christina Coulter, PEOPLE, 7 Nov. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'workhouse.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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