brothel
Americannoun
-
brothels
plural
noun
-
a house or other place where men pay to have sexual intercourse with prostitutes
-
informal any untidy or messy place
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of brothel
First recorded in 1350–1400, for an earlier sense; short for brothel-house “whorehouse”; Middle English brothel “harlot,” originally, “worthless person,” from broth- (past participle stem of brethen, Old English brēothan “to decay, degenerate”) + -el, noun suffix
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
No-nonsense Maomao, a Tang Dynasty-era girl raised in a brothel who escapes servitude to parlay her apothecary skills in service of the palace, is one of the best female protagonists of all time.
From Salon ● Dec. 19, 2025
There, the hard-working seven-person cast of “Dark Noon,” which opened on Monday, spends much of the production’s 105 minutes assembling the edifices of westward-creeping American civilization, from home to brothel to church to jail.
From New York Times ● Jun. 18, 2024
“Poor Things” features Bella, a reanimated woman who has to invent her life, and her guideposts are a prostitute, a brothel madam and a former actress.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 19, 2023
Of course, his Spanish background was essential to his genius: “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” was named after a brothel in Barcelona, and “Guernica” was a response to a fascist atrocity in the Spanish Civil War.
From Washington Post ● Mar. 22, 2023
The sept tempted him no more than the brothel; his own gods kept their temples in the wild places, where the weirwoods spread their bone-white branches.
From "A Clash of Kings" by George R.R. Martin
A South Korean court has ordered Japan to compensate a group of women who were forced to work in military brothels during World War Two.
From BBC ● Nov. 23, 2023
Kono is the son of retired politician and former chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono, who authored a landmark 1993 apology to women forced to work in Japanese military wartime brothels.
From Reuters ● Aug. 10, 2022
The Tabor Opera House quickly grabbed the attention of a bustling, rowdy city full of competing theaters, saloons and brothels.
From New York Times ● Aug. 11, 2021
He rejected accounts of forced labor as "pure fiction," saying the Japanese army "did not dragoon Korean women to work in its brothels."
From Fox News ● Mar. 8, 2021
Jewish fathers took their daughters to brothels for safe hiding.
From The Jew and American Ideals by John Spargo
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
