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leaping house. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
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English
Alternative forms
Noun
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 Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, :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
- Oxford English Dictionary, second edition (1989)