plural noun

• Accommodation for the winter, especially for soldiers.

  ‘After these battles the British and American armies went into winter quarters.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Besides devoting his own efforts to making preparations for the expedition's departure in the spring, Lewis planned to use the period spent in winter quarters to test the leadership skills of his NCOs.’
  • ‘The expedition constructed winter quarters, consisting of an enclosed stockade and barracks.’
  • ‘Then the French set out in search of winter quarters, but the country was too poor for the army to live off.’
  • ‘His house became winter quarters with the first fires he lit inside.’
  • ‘Thus far he is making no effort to move his troops from their winter quarters around Washington and probably won't get very far in this mud.’
  • ‘With the weather-caused abandonment of that movement, the regiment settled into more advanced winter quarters at Stafford Courthouse.’
  • ‘The breeding season is finely tuned to coincide with peak autumn bird migration; falcons feed their young with small and medium-sized birds on passage migration between Eurasia and African winter quarters.’
  • ‘The population was monitored from the time the lizards emerged from hibernation (in September / October) until they returned to their winter quarters in April the following year.’
  • ‘Males arrive at the breeding grounds from the African winter quarters before females, and in the Spanish study, population barn swallows arrive from several weeks to more than 2 months before the start of breeding.’
  • ‘Food is probably the most important ecological factor affecting migrants in their winter quarters, and Palearctic migrants do not, aside from a few exceptions, breed in Afrotropical regions.’
  • ‘Applying mulch too early in the season, when the ground is still soft and warm, can invite infestations by field mice and other critters who like to burrow in to establish winter quarters (and no doubt dig up tasty tulip treats!).’
  • ‘Here they turned south, setting to paper the topography and place names along the eastern foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, thence across the arid plains to the North Platte and winter quarters.’
  • ‘In 1977 I spent most of one morning sitting on a mountainside watching groups of Ahmadzai nomads crossing a wide valley below me on their way to summer pastures in the Hindu Kush from their winter quarters near Quetta in Pakistan.’
  • ‘A migratory bird, the common nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos Brehm) arrives in Berlin in late April from its winter quarters in the African tropics.’
  • ‘From early May to early June in year one we searched two of the selected plots for male collared flycatchers that had newly arrived after their migration from the African winter quarters.’
  • ‘I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters.’
  • ‘The project aims to discover how the birds - a smaller version of the curlew - use staging posts in Britain as they make their way from their African winter quarters to their breeding grounds in the far north.’
  • ‘In contrast to those who built winter quarters from logs, experienced men typically spent their winters in buffalo-skin lodges that held six or seven men.’
  • ‘Early-season cool fronts in September can trigger an exodus of many whitewings as the birds migrate to winter quarters in Mexico and points south.’