Word.ws English Dictionary

calaboose

/ˌkæləˈbuːs/

calaboose noun: a prison or jail/gaol.

Noun

calaboose (plural calabooses)

  1. (Australia, US, dialectal) A prison or jail/gaol.
    • The slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of Bear Creek and so is the small jail (or 'calaboose') which once stood in its neighborhood. A citizen asked, 'Do you remember when Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, was burned to death in the calaboose?'1883, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter 56, in Life on the Mississippi, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company, →OCLC
    • Bogator: (Still unbelieving) And you turned the calaboose over?1937, Langston Hughes, When the Jack Hollers; or Careless Love: A Negro-Folk Comedy in Three Acts, in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 5. The Plays to 1942: Mulatto to The Sun Do Move...

calaboose meaning in Tamil

calaboose in Tamil

சிறைக்கூடம், காவல் மனை

Examples of calaboose in a sentence

  • […] he had but recently come out of Calaboose, where he had been serving a term for debt […]1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter IX, in Capricornia, New York: D. Appleton-Century, published 1943, page 150:
  • The first calaboose or city jail used by the officers of the law was located on Cumberland Street, just below the vacant lot adjacent to the Star Steam Laundry.2001, Sylvia D. Lynch, To Protect and Serve: History of the Knoxville Police Department, 1849-2001, Turner Publishing Company, page 79:
  • Many of these usages are still part of colloquial speech today in both of these countries, for example: fella for 'one', […] no good, orright, calaboose, […]2004, Darrell T. Tryon, Jean-Michel Charpentier, chapter 5, in Pacific Pidgins and Creoles: Origins, Growth and Development, Mouton de...

Synonyms of calaboose

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of calaboose

Forms of calaboose

pluralcalabooses

Origin of calaboose

From Cajun French calabousse, from Spanish calabozo. Doublet of calabozo.

Questions about calaboose

What does calaboose mean?
Calaboose means a prison or jail/gaol.
What is calaboose in Tamil?
Calaboose in Tamil is சிறைக்கூடம், காவல் மனை. See Calaboose meaning in Tamil.
How do you use calaboose in a sentence?
[…] he had but recently come out of Calaboose, where he had been serving a term for debt […]
What part of speech is calaboose?
Calaboose is a noun.
How do you pronounce calaboose?
Calaboose is pronounced /ˌkæləˈbuːs/.
What is the plural of calaboose?
The plural of calaboose is calabooses.

Words near calaboose in the dictionary

  1. calabazillas
  2. Calabcab
  3. Calabi-Yau manifold
  4. Calabi-Yau space
  5. Calabnigan
  6. calaboose
  7. calabooses
  8. calabozo
  9. calabozos
  10. calabrasella
  11. calabrese

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: calaboose (page history and authors); calaboose (Tamil Wiktionary) (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-calaboose.wav.

Cite this entry: “calaboose.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/calaboose. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.