leaping house
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See also: leaping-house
English[edit]
Alternative forms[edit]
Noun[edit]
leaping house (plural leaping houses)
- (obsolete) A brothel.
- c. 1597 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Fourth, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene ii]:
- Unless hours were cups of sack and minutes capons and clocks the tongues of bawds and dials the signs of leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.
- 2003, M. S. Morton, M. Morton, The Lover's Tongue: A Merry Romp Through the Language of Love and Sex, Insomniac Press,, →ISBN, page 221:
- In the late sixteenth century, the word nunnery also came to mean brothel. . . . Around the same time, the synonymous leaping-house also emerged, which anticipated the eighteenth-century terms vaulting-school and pushing-school, all implying vigorous acts of sex.
References[edit]
- Oxford English Dictionary, second edition (1989)