The word "hovel" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when referring to a small, dirty, and often miserable-looking dwelling. For example: "The family had to live in a cramped and dirty hovel."
Mine enemy's dog, Though he had bit me, should have stood that night Against my fire; and wast thou fain, poor father, To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn In short and musty straw?
"I shudder to think what they think of our hovel in London," says my bemused brother-in-law.
The Emperor also believed his fictitious beloved was the mother of his firstborn son, his long-awaited firstborn son, conceived because of the blessing of a saint, that very saint beside whose hilltop hovel this victory city had been built.
I don't want to play the victim, but it took us years to cross the dozen or so metres that separated our hovel from the settlers' house, years of tiny, fettered steps, as if we were slogging through mud or quicksand in a nightmare.
At first, my wife would object, pointing out that our hovel needed re-wattling, and now that the cow was sick we would have plenty of fresh manure for the job.
In my memory, those nights are associated with rainy winters, with the dim light of the oil lamp in our hovel, and with Mama's murmuring voice.
Was there a secret intellectual-Jew hovel there, with book-lined shelves, Sigmundian fetish masks, funky, unfumigatable Persian carpets?
The boy touched his temple, hot with rage: a low-ceilinged parlor came into view, with its filthy window, further shaded by a ragged net curtain, the whole musty hovel lit by candles.
"I work for my mother each day now, so that we may eat," she said, pointing to the bags of charcoal they sell in front of their hovel.
Hoagland captures a world of extremes where alcohol abuse is rampant, violence breaks out in places miles from the nearest law enforcement agent and the harsh climate permits no mistakes: "In the winter, a drunk could stumble home, forget to light the fire in his hovel before passing out" and be found dead in the morning.
Depends on Whom You Ask As in real estate, where a hovel next to an airshaft might be advertised as bursting with potential, there will always be someone eager to sell you on the virtues of a given breed.
