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Anna Karenina vocabulary
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counting-house
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► definition
Definition:A businessman's office.Daniel Pool. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. p.293 (1993)---Wiktionary and Wikpedia claim a counting-house is specifically for an accounting department. The description of a counting-house in Dickens' David Copperfield, however, leads one to believe Daniel Pool is correct with his simple definition.From the novel David Copperfield:Murdstone and Grinby’s trade was among a good many kinds of people, but an important branch of it was the supply of wines and spirits to certain packet ships. I forget now where they chiefly went, but I think there were some among them that made voyages both to the East and West Indies. I know that a great many empty bottles were one of the consequences of this traffic, and that certain men and boys were employed to examine them against the light, and reject those that were flawed, and to rinse and wash them. When the empty bottles ran short, there were labels to be pasted on full ones, or corks to be fitted to them, or seals to be put upon the corks, or finished bottles to be packed in casks. All this work was my work, and of the boys employed upon it I was one.---(dated) An office used by a business to house its accounts department.text from Wiktionary, licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealikehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/' rel='noopener external ' target='_blank'>https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/---(or computing house) is the building, room, office or suite in which a business firm carries on operations, particularly accounting. By a synecdoche, it has come to mean the accounting operations of a firm, however housed. The term is British in origin and is primarily used in the context of the 19th century or earlier periods.text from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealikehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/' rel='noopener external ' target='_blank'>https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
► uses
Uses:
I mingled my tears with the water in which I was washing the bottles; and sobbed as if there were a flaw in my own breast, and it were in danger of bursting.
The counting-house clock was at half past twelve, and there was general preparation for going to dinner, when Mr. Quinion tapped at the counting-house window, and beckoned to me to go in.
Charles Dickens. David Copperfield (1850)
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my poor father put me, when I was about fifteen years of age, into the counting-house of what be termed “a respectable hardware and commission merchant doing a capital bit of business!” A capital bit of fiddlestick!
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“Yes. I am in a counting-house, and looking about me.”
“Is a counting-house profitable?” I asked.
“To—do you mean to the young fellow who's in it?” he asked, in reply.
“Yes; to you.”
“Why, n-no; not to me.”
Charles Dickens. Great Expectations (1861)
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the village elder had come now to announce that the hay had been cut, and that, fearing rain, they had invited the counting-house clerk over, had divided the crop in his presence, and had raked together eleven stacks as the owner’s share.
Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina
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