the.com/roundhouse
a circular building for turning trains, hijacked forever by a man kicking faces in slow motion
means A circular or semicircular building where locomotives are stored, serviced, and turned around using a central turntable — though the word also names a wide, sweeping swing of the arm or leg that comes from far off and lands hard.
from A plain compound of "round" and "house," exactly as it sounds. The railway sense arose in the 19th century, naming the literal round buildings built around a turntable so engines could be rotated and parked like spokes on a wheel. The "swinging blow" sense is also old — boxing and brawling slang for a punch that travels in a wide arc rather than a straight line, the idea being a strike that comes "all the way around." The leg-based roundhouse kick that dominates the modern imagination is a later martial-arts borrowing of that same circular logic.
- Train origin
- Round design let locomotives rotate on a central turntable
- Chuck Norris
- His spinning kick made the word mean pain
- Architecture
- Surviving ones now host museums, markets, and weddings
- Boxing term
- A wild swinging punch thrown from way outside
longleat roundhouse — great western railway roundhouse in wiltshire, england built in 1841