sporting house
- noun
- NSFW
:
burdel
- The old sporting house on the corner was notorious for its rowdy clientele.
Examples
-
This nude was thinly veiled, which also may once have been the dress code for girls working upstairs in Leadville's better sporting houses.
Fiction book (2001) -
Deacon Hansen, they call you Sunday, and then Monday you find they've given the milk-hand a black eye, and that their youngest got himself cut up in a sporting house over in Shawano.
Fiction book (2000) -
"Hazelhedge will be the finest sporting house on the East Coast, Minyon.
Fiction book (1994) -
Mizz Addie says clean linens are the surest sign of a first-class sporting house.
Fiction book (1994) -
"This is the kind of razor cadets use to trim their mustaches before they go down to the dockyards to wait for the newest batch of Irish women for the sporting houses."
Fiction book (1995) -
Larkin had a penchant for this image and was making variations on it as late as 1954 in the "Sporting-house girls like circus tigers (priced far above rubies).
Academic text (1991) -
After a long night at the sporting house, the men stumbled home as dawn broke.
-
The authorities shut down the sporting house after numerous complaints from residents.
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
8.9
A place where people pay to have sex
1
7.6
A building where people pay for sex
A house where people go to pay for sex
A building where people pay for sex
Surface Forms
Morphology
The sense 'brothel' cannot be derived from the common meanings of 'sporting' (normally 'engaged in sports' or 'amused/pleasure-seeking') and 'house' (building or establishment); here 'sporting' has an archaic/euphemistic sexual sense that a B1 learner is unlikely to know. This is an idiomatic, historically conditioned collocation whose meaning is not predictable from its parts and therefore would be opaque to most learners.
Etymology
The noun sporting house comes from an older use of sporting meaning 'fun' or 'play' and house meaning a place to go. People used this name for buildings where men paid for sex and other entertainment, so it became a polite term for a 'brothel'.