Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Usage examples of "meeting-house".
The old meeting-house was two stories in height, the lower story having been formerly used by the Free Grace Believers as a place wherein to celebrate certain obscure mysteries appertaining to their belief.
No wolf, for a year past, has been heard to bark, or known to range among the dwellings, except that single one, whose grisly head, with a plash of blood beneath it, is now affixed to the portal of the meeting-house.
In the old days it would have been thought unphilosophic as well as effeminate to warm the meeting-houses artificially.
This was on the 30th of November, and on the 14th of December, two other ships freighted by the East India Company having arrived, another crowded meeting was held at the Old South Meeting-house, whence orders were sent to the captains of the tea vessels to return without delay.
I now proclaim how you have wickedly and sacrilegiously turned the Old Free Grace Meeting-House into a slave-pen, whence for above a year you have conducted a nefarious and most inhuman commerce with the West Indies.
These itinerants are, for the most part, lodged in the houses of their respective followers, and every evening that is not spent in the churches and meeting-houses, is devoted to what would be called parties by others, but which they designate as prayer meetings.
These scenes are going on at some house or other every evening during the revival, nay, at many at the same time, for the churches and meeting-houses cannot give occupation to half the Itinerants, though they are all open throughout the day, and till a late hour in the night, and the officiating ministers succeed each other in the occupation of them.
Having found out that some High Church Tories belonging to his own division intended to pull down, or burn a Presbyterian meeting-house in the town, he peremptorily forbade them, declaring he would punish any who disobeyed his orders.
A country meeting-house, that was used once a month, was quite a distance from any other house.
Look at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them.