Other forms: hideouts
A hideout is a place where somebody hides from pursuit. A mountain hideout, find the hideout, holed up in a hideout.
It belongs to fugitives and to fiction — a bandit's hideout, a rebel hideout — and the word implies both concealment and a base to work from. Hideaway is the gentler cousin, meaning a quiet retreat by choice. Note that hide-out is sometimes hyphenated; and that hide as a noun in British English means a screened shelter for watching birds, which is the opposite purpose entirely.
1nounhideoutA place where somebody hides from pursuit.
“The robbers used an empty farmhouse in the hills as their hideout.”
hideout is a place of concealment.
Hide plus out, a plain English compound of the nineteenth century. English forms nouns from phrasal verbs constantly — lookout, takeaway, breakdown — and this is one of them.
From hide + out.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA