1. workhouse - Noun
2. workhouse - Verb
A house where any manufacture is carried on; a workshop.
A house in which idle and vicious persons are confined to labor.
A house where the town poor are maintained at public expense, and provided with labor; a poorhouse.
Source: Webster's dictionaryLawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse. Dorothy L. Sayers
Four specters haunt the Poor - Old Age, Accident, Sickness and Unemployment. We are going to exorcise them. We are going to drive hunger from the hearth. We mean to banish the workhouse from the horizon of every workman in the land. David Lloyd George
Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse. George Bernard Shaw
As early as 1802 and 1819, Factory Acts were passed to limit the working hours of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day. Source: Internet
Chaplin, p. 29. He was briefly reunited with his mother 18 months later, before Hannah was forced to readmit her family to the workhouse in July 1898. Source: Internet
Female convicts were assigned as servants in free settler households or sent to a female factory (women's workhouse prison). Source: Internet