house of ill repute
2
8.9
- noun
- NSFW
:
casa de mala reputación
- He was arrested last night for entering a house of ill repute in the city's red-light district.
Examples
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You don't seem like the type of guy that would be here in this house of ill repute.
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The surrounding counties would issue permits for houses of ill repute faster than they would allow a house to be turned into a duplex.
Blog text (32) -
A man who lives in a house of ill-repute, hiding from his wife.
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It's a house of ill repute.
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You know that Billy Holiday was born in a house of ill repute?
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This is kind of a house of ill repute, or somethin', is it?
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Again, they went to Middie's house of ill repute.
Fiction book (1996) -
Irma and Otto were running what my dear old granddaddy used to call a house of ill repute.
Fiction book (1992) -
Indeed, one of the first issues tells a fictional story about a woman who had been employed in a house of ill repute who finally managed to work her way out of that life and get a respectable job as a servant in a kitchen.
Blog text (25) -
You'd have smugglers out there, you'd have houses of ill repute, and so forth.
Blog text (19)
Synonyms
77
6.3
A place where people pay to have sex with prostitutes
42
7.8
A building where people pay to have sex with prostitutes
9
9.6
A building where people pay to have sex
7
9.6
A place where people pay for sex
2
9.1
A place where people often secretly do illegal or immoral things
1
7.6
A building where people pay for sex
1
9.9
A place where people pay for sex, often seen as wrong
A house where people go to pay for sex
A house where people pay for sex
A building where people pay for sex
How Disreputable
- NSFW
2
8.9
- NSFW
77
6.3
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase literally composes as 'house' + 'of' + 'ill repute' = a house with a bad reputation, so part of the meaning is directly derivable from the constituents. However, identifying the specific sense 'brothel' requires cultural/pragmatic inference and familiarity with the idiomatic collocation 'ill repute', which is somewhat formal and may not be fully predictable to a B1 learner, so the transparency is partial.
Etymology
House of ill repute comes from a polite way of saying a house had a 'bad reputation'. People used house and ill repute to hint the place was known for sexual services, so it now means a 'brothel'.