warehouse

noun

1. 1

   A facility for storing large amounts of merchandise or products.

   Think of banking today and the image is of grey-suited men in towering skyscrapers. Its future, however, is being shaped in converted warehouses and funky offices in San Francisco, New York and London, where bright young things in jeans and T-shirts huddle around laptops, sipping lattes or munching on free food.

2. 2

   An intermediate facility where goods are transported from the manufacturer prior to their distribution to retailers.

verb

1. 1

   To store in a warehouse or similar.

   Tobacco, for instance, shrinks materially by frequent reshippings, and as all goods are warehoused as a convenience to importers, duties should be paid on what the importer receives.

2. 2

   To confine (a person) to an institution for a long period.

   When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning, but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing.

   We nevertheless pay hundreds of thousands of pounds to process many of these children through the criminal justice system, and to warehouse them for years – and even more if they end up graduating to adult prisons, as most of them do.

3. 3

   To acquire and then shelve, simply to prevent competitors from acquiring it.

   the warehousing of syndicated TV shows

Forms

plural

warehouses

past tense

warehoused

past participle

warehoused

present participle

warehousing

third person singular

warehouses