Dictionary

disorderly house en · NOUN

Meanings

1. (dated, euphemistic) A brothel.
   • Her crime was less dramatic: she was found guilty of keeping a disorderly house by the Westminster magistrate Sir John Gonson […]. 2009, Dan Cruikshank, The Secret History of Georgian London, Random House, page 5:
   • Pekara, along with Officers Robert Margelewski and Roger O'Brien then ordered the theater lights turned on and began making arrests. Sixteen men were charged as inmates of a disorderly house and the cashier was arrested as the keeper of a disorderly house. The man from Elgin was arrested on charges of soliciting an act of prostitution. 1981 August 22, Larry Goldsmith, “Theater Sex Charges Dropped”, in Gay Community News, volume 9, number 6, page 1:
   • But there was also about him an indescribable air which no mechanic could have acquired in the practice of his handicraft however dishonestly exercised: […] the air of moral nihilism common to keepers of gambling hells and disorderly houses […]. 1906 January–October, Joseph Conrad, chapter II, in The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Collection of British Authors; 3995), copyright edition, London: Bernhard Tauchnitz, published 1907, →OCLC, page 15:
   • Four years ago Cynthia Payne was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment for keeping a disorderly house. Madam Sin of Streatham gave the popular newspapers everything they had ever wished for – kinky sex, anonymous Top People, a police raid and, the most intriguing element of all, payment by Luncheon Voucher. 1982 October 12, Craig Brown, “Writing Cynthia Payne's biography”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:

Forms