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hothouse

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
See also: hot-house

English

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1836 Kew garden hothouse

Alternative forms

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Etymology

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From Middle English hothous, equivalent to hot +‎ house.

Noun

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hothouse (plural hothouses)

  1. A heated greenhouse.
  2. (figurative) An environment in which growth or development is encouraged naturally or artificially; a hotbed.
    • 1989, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by H. T. Willetts, August 1914, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →ISBN, page 163:
      This had given him the strength to leave cadet school at seventeen and volunteer for active service, reach the rank of second lieutenant no later than his hothouse-bred contemporaries, begin his military studies in the General Staff Academy itself, and, still only twenty-five, graduate not only with top marks but with promotion out of turn for special excellence in military science.
    • 1989, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by H. T. Willetts, August 1914, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →ISBN, page 182:
      In 1906 and 1907 defeat was not yet total, society was still on the boil, spinning around the rim of the maelstrom. Lenin had sat in Kuokkala, waiting in vain for the second wave. But from 1908, when the reactionary rabble had tightened its grip on the whole of Russia, the underground had shriveled to nothing, the workers had swarmed like ants out of their holes and into legal bodies—trade unions and insurance associations—and the decline of the underground had sapped the vitality of the emigration too, reduced it to a hothouse existence. Back there was the Duma, a legal press—and every émigré was eager to publish there.
    • 2022, Lindsey Fitzharris, The Facemaker, page 53:
      A seed had been planted in Gillies's mind—and as he took up his next assignment, it would be nurtured in the brutal hothouse of frontline surgery.
  3. An environment full of conflict or plots.
    • 2024 November 14, Phil McNulty, “'A night of redemption for Carsley offers real hope for Tuchel'”, in BBC Sport‎[1]:
      As with much of Carsley's reign, England entered this Athens hothouse with sub-plots in the background, this time the nine withdrawals from the squad which was met with a critical public response from the normally strictly-on-message captain Harry Kane.
  4. (obsolete) A bagnio, or bathing house; a brothel.
  5. A heated room for drying greenware.
  6. (climatology) A hot state in global climate.
    Synonym: greenhouse
    Antonym: icehouse
    • 2010, BioWare, Mass Effect 2 (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →OCLC, PC, scene: Kruban:
      Kruban is a tidally-locked Venusian hothouse, its surface perpetually obscured by clouds of sulfur and carbon dioxides.

Derived terms

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Translations

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Verb

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hothouse (third-person singular simple present hothouses, present participle hothousing, simple past and past participle hothoused)

  1. (transitive) To provide (a child) with an enriched environment with the aim of stimulating academic development.
    • 2019, Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other, Penguin Books (2020), page 245:
      she had such an exceptional grasp of maths in her first two years at the school theyʼd been hothousing her to sit her GCSE Maths two years early

See also

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