Word.ws English Dictionary

ale-drapery

ale-drapery noun: the running of an alehouse.

Noun

ale-drapery

  1. (obsolete) The running of an alehouse.
    • and fare at all tymes as harde as poor Mopos Cut did with his maisters contreyman in Shorditch, till, by the force of his hinder heeles, he vtterly vndid two milch maydens that had set vp a shoppe of Ale-drapery.1592, H. Chettle, Kind-harts Dreames, page 20
    • An ale-house keeper would “with a grave air complain that trade was not sufficiently encouraged, when he meant the trade of ale drapery and smoking tobacco'.”2002, Richard Grassby, The Business Community of Seventeenth-Century England, page 226

Origin of ale-drapery

From ale-draper + -y.

Questions about ale-drapery

What does ale-drapery mean?
Ale-drapery means the running of an alehouse.
What part of speech is ale-drapery?
Ale-drapery is a noun.

Words near ale-drapery in the dictionary

  1. ale-connors
  2. ale-cost
  3. ale-costs
  4. ale-draper
  5. ale-drapers
  6. ale-drapery
  7. ale-hoof
  8. ale-house
  9. ale-houses
  10. ale-knight
  11. ale-knights

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ale-drapery (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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