Word.ws English Dictionary

dress the house

dress the house verb: to position oneself, or others, so as to make the auditorium appear fuller than it really is.

Verb

dress the house (third-person singular simple present dresses the house, present participle dressing the house, simple past and past participle dressed the house)

  1. To position oneself, or others, so as to make the auditorium appear fuller than it really is.
    • […] to pay this tax through inviting a certain class of the public, who are always invited, to theatres of standing to dress the house.1917, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), page cccxlvi
    • […] we critics were not his fellow-guests, but simply deadheads whose business it was to "dress the house" and write puffs.1931, Bernard Shaw, Our Theatre in the Nineties, volume 24, page 246

Forms of dress the house

third-person singular presentdresses the house
present participledressing the house
past participledressed the house
pastdressed the house

Questions about dress the house

What does dress the house mean?
Dress the house means to position oneself, or others, so as to make the auditorium appear fuller than it really is.
What part of speech is dress the house?
Dress the house is a verb.
What is the past tense of dress the house?
The past tense of dress the house is dressed the house.

Words near dress the house in the dictionary

  1. dress shoes
  2. dress shorts
  3. dress suit
  4. dress suits
  5. dress tape
  6. dress the house
  7. dress the part
  8. dress to kill
  9. dress up
  10. dress'd
  11. dress-code

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dress the house (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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