shotgun house

English

A shotgun house viewed from the front.

Etymology

• New Orleans architectural historian Samuel Wilson, Jr. has suggested that the term alludes to the idea that if all the doors are opened, a shotgun blast fired into the house from the front doorway will fly cleanly to the other end and out at the back.
• Folklorist John Michael Vlach has suggested a corruption of a Dahomey Fon area term "to-gun", meaning "place of assembly", brought to New Orleans by Afro-Haitian slaves.

Noun

shotgun house (plural shotgun houses)

1. A narrow shack with a door at each end, common in the Southern United States from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s.

   Synonyms: shotgun, shotgun shack

   • 2019, Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, Fleet, page 25:

     Dr. King’s words filled the front room of the shotgun house.

Further reading

• shotgun house on Wikipedia.Wikipedia