opium den
4
9.9
- noun
- /ˈoʊpiəm dɛn/
- NSFW
:
casa de opio
- The old movie depicted life in an opium den, showing how people would gather and smoke together.
- brothels and opium dens
- Chinese opium den
- run an opium den
That's, you know, if we go back in history, as you know, there were the opium dens throughout Asia.
- That's, you know, if we go back in history, as you know, there were the opium dens throughout Asia.
Examples
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Walking through the dark alley, we stumbled upon an opium den filled with the smell of smoke and incense.
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In the 19th century, many travelers wrote about their experiences in an opium den in Chinatown.
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I met a little girl in an opium den today, and she was...
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I just keep seeing that little girl in the opium den.
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So many sights, and you visit an opium den?
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I was in a real high-stakes game in some opium den.
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They say she ran an opium den.
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The beds rose one atop the other like bunks in an opium den.
Fiction book (1998) -
You think if Jilli Hopper hadn't come to New York with you on your little field trip to an opium den, you think maybe, just maybe, she'd be alive today?
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Like any other officer, he knew there were opium dens in parts of London, where those addicted to the substance could obtain it and then lie in tiers of narrow cots and smoke themselves into their own brief, private oblivion.
Fiction book (1993)
Synonyms
1
9.5
A place often in an abandoned building where people buy and inject heroin
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a place where people buy and smoke opium' is directly and compositionally predictable from 'opium' (the drug) combined with 'den' (a hidden or illicit lair/place). This follows normal noun+noun compounding patterns and is cross-linguistically transparent, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents can reasonably infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Opium den comes from the simple picture of a small, hidden room where people smoked opium. A den is a private, often shady place, so the phrase came to mean 'a place where people buy and smoke opium', often secretly or illegally.