greenhouse

Pluralgreenhouses

Formsgreenhouses, greenhousing, greenhoused

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A building, often walled with glass or plastic sheeting, used to grow plants by trapping the sun's heat through cold seasons or climates.

   Her greenhouse was full of orchids that needed steady warmth.

   Commercial growers raise seedlings in heated greenhouses through the spring.

   Similarglasshouse, hothouse, conservatory

   Note

   The name comes from what grows inside, not from the color of the glass: green plus house, a house for growing greens. The building could be grand as well as practical. In Letitia Elizabeth Landon's Ethel Churchill (1837), a royal party dines in one, among stands of costly exotics that reach a glass roof half-covered by a vine. It was a room for company, not only a place to raise seedlings.

2. 2
   verbfigurativelytransitive

   To nurture something carefully in order to encourage its growth or development.

   The mentor worked to greenhouse her protégé's confidence over many months.

   Foundations often greenhouse promising research before larger institutions take notice.

   Similarnurture, foster, cultivate, incubate

   Note

   The figurative extension of the gardener's verb. What gets greenhoused is an idea, a talent or a project still too tender for open air. Chris Barez-Brown's How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas (2008) speaks of 'baby ideas' being 'nurtured and greenhoused'. That shows two habits of the word: it sits comfortably in the passive, and it pairs naturally with nurture.

3. 3
   verbtransitive

   To move plants under glass by placing them in a greenhouse.

   Each fall, growers greenhouse their most delicate plants to protect them.

   The botanical garden greenhoused its new collection of tropical ferns, which could never survive the local climate outdoors.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A warm interval in the global climate, when average temperatures across the Earth are high.

   Throughout the dinosaur era, the planet sat in a prolonged greenhouse.

   Geologists trace several greenhouses in the deep history of Earth's climate.

   Similarhothouse

   Oppositeicehouse

   Note

   Climatologists use the word as one half of a pair: a greenhouse world stands opposite an icehouse world, and hothouse serves as a near-synonym. Because it names a state of the whole planet that comes and goes, it is countable: a greenhouse, several greenhouses. The image is borrowed from the glass plant house, whose purpose is to trap heat.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   A protective structure placed over an operating table to shield it from bacteria during surgery.

   Like a sterile bubble around the patient, sealing the surgery off from the room's air.

   Surgeons in the early clinic relied on the greenhouse to keep bacteria away from open wounds.

   Before antiseptic methods improved, each greenhouse enclosed the operating table to limit infection.

   Note

   A surgeon's borrowing from the gardener's glass building: a small walled room set around the operating table so that the air inside it can be controlled. Charnley's design drew air downward in one steady direction over the table, and Southern Hospitals in 1972 described a 10-by-10-foot aluminum frame with plexiglass panes on three sides and a polyvinyl curtain on the fourth. It belongs to the vocabulary of cleanroom and operating-room design.

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