prisonhouse

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   a prison or the principal building of a prison

   The old prisonhouse stood behind a double ring of walls.

2. 2
   noun

   something that confines a person as if within a prison

   He longed to escape the prisonhouse of his own disposition.

A compound of prison + house. Beyond the literal prison building, literary use makes a body, temperament, or circumstance a prisonhouse when it restricts the self like a physical jail.

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