From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishhovelhov‧el /ˈhɒvəl $ ˈhʌ-, ˈhɑː-/ noun [countable] DIRTYa small dirty place where someone lives, especially a very poor person
Examples from the Corpus
hovel• If you are on your own in a hovel it is nothing other than miserable.• Not a hovel, not a peasant, not even a chicken nosing through the cinders.• It shows that not all labourers' cottages were flimsy hovels and that families in this group could aspire to reasonable comfort.• He thought of Hob dying in his hovel, his wife frightened of the future.• Yartsov and 12 other families who were assigned rundown concrete one-room hovels clustered in a muddy field.• The bear moved into the gardener's hovel.• Ridgery Butts was a slovenly, poor village, clay and thatch hovels clustered about its church and windmill.• The guy who owned the hovel was named Mr Bartles.Origin hovel (1300-1400) Perhaps from Low German 