countinghouse

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count·ing·house

also count·ing house (koun′tĭng-hous′)

A building, room, or office in which a business firm carries on operations such as accounting and correspondence.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Noun

countinghouse - office used by the accountants of a business

business office, office - place of business where professional or clerical duties are performed; "he rented an office in the new building"

Britain, Great Britain, U.K., UK, United Kingdom, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - a monarchy in northwestern Europe occupying most of the British Isles; divided into England and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland; `Great Britain' is often used loosely to refer to the United Kingdom

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References in classic literature ?

"Do you know your little Vanya's with me, a clerk in the countinghouse at Pokrovskoe."

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His satellites- the senior clerk, a countinghouse clerk, a scullery maid, a cook, two old women, a little pageboy, the coachman, and various domestic serfs- were seeing him off.

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Ratcliffe, the poor clerk and Eliza's brother, is the bearer of the old aristocratic cult of honor (given to Antonio in Shakespeare's play), for though now obliged to work in the countinghouse as Bertram's "slave" to support his mother and sister, Ratcliffe is the descendant of a noble Jacobite family, which has "bled for [its] opinions" and been ruined by "the axe and the sword."

Cumberland's Benevolent Hebrew in eighteenth-century Britain and America

Although the city never built more than half a dozen actual boats, the debate about Genoa's continuing ability to make a difference at sea (as opposed to in the countinghouse) allowed for civic mythmaking as well as for political arguments.

Genoa and the Sea: Policy and Power in an Early Modern Maritime Republic, 1559-1684

By Merritt's count, more than two-dozen Knight Ridder editors and publishers left the company in the latter 1990's because they could not adapt to the new countinghouse culture.

The silent takeover of American journalism: '... realistic solutions to the problems newspaper editors face nowadays are elusive as best.'

This is given a wonderfully droll articulation in Lamb's second Elia essay, "Oxford in the Vacation" (October 1820), in which Elia's India House work sends him home with "increased appetite" to his books, so that the "outside sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally, the impression of sonnets, epigrams, essays - so that the very parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author." Cast-off scraps of paper or the shavings-down of the quill, these "parings" of the countinghouse are reemployed.