flophouse
/ˈflɒphaʊs/noun, verb
flophouse is a noun meaning “A cheap hotel or boarding house where many people sleep in large rooms” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-L-O-P-H-O-U-S-E, and it appears about once in every 22 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of flophouse is flophouses.
What does flophouse mean?
noun
- 1
USslangA cheap hotel or boarding house where many people sleep in large rooms.
In one of [Cincinnati’s] slum districts stands the Silver Moon, a “flop house” (i.e., a house where the occupants are “flopped” out of their hanging bunks by letting down the ropes).
verb
- 1
To stay in a flophouse.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce flophouse?
- UK /ˈflɒphaʊs/
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-au-flophouse.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of flophouse
- flophouses plural, present, singular, he/she/it
- flop-house
- flophousing participle, present
- flophoused participle, past
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is flophouse?
Flophouse appears about once in every 22 million words in written English, the 143,405th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Where does flophouse come from?
From flop + house, originally hobo slang, presumably from slang flop (“lie down to sleep”).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).