Charnel House
/ˈtʃɑːr.nəl haʊs/noun
A building or room used to store bones or corpses.
Did you know?The word’s root is tied to Latin *caro* “flesh,” which also lives on in words like “carnal” and “carnivore,” making it one of English’s most unsettling body-to-bone transformations.
Etymological Timeline
Latin
Latin
carō
“flesh, meat”
Late Latin
LL
carnāle
“fleshly place or repository”
Old French
OF
charnel
“flesh; graveyard or ossuary”
Middle English
English
charnel hous
“house or vault for corpses or bones”
Modern English
English
charnel house
“a place for storing corpses or bones; figuratively, a scene of death and decay”