Word.ws English Dictionary

graybar hotel

graybar hotel noun: jail, prison.

Noun

the graybar hotel

  1. (US, slang) Jail, prison.
    • Outside his cage were more bars, and, beyond them, narrow steel-bound windows looked out over Los Angeles from the fifteenth floor of the Hall of Justice. The trusties called it the Graybar Hotel, a modern fireproof establishment, with room service.1949, Ray Morrison, Angels Camp
    • Or busted and sent to the graybar hotel for twenty years on a heavy federal rap.2001, Steve Perry, Point of Impact (Tom Clancy's Net Force), →ISBN, page 103

Examples of graybar hotel in a sentence

  • […] could well wind up in the graybar hotel if any of the situations Lauren paints here actually do take place.2003, The Cook Report on Internet, NREN, page 37:
  • If you do something like this, I will be sure that you spend a long, long time in the graybar hotel.2004, Eliot Trimberger, The Epilepsy and Osteoporosis Link, page 197:

Synonyms of graybar hotel

Forms of graybar hotel

alternative formgray bar hotel

Origin of graybar hotel

Referring to the gray metal bars of a cell. It may have originally referred to the main jail facility in downtown Los Angeles, California; some inmates who were ashamed of admitting that they were in jail would tell friends and relatives who were out of town and that they were staying at the Graybar Hotel. Before it was torn down it was so well known that prisoners received mail addressed to the Graybar Hotel in Los Angeles.

Questions about graybar hotel

What does graybar hotel mean?
Graybar hotel means jail, prison.
How do you use graybar hotel in a sentence?
[…] could well wind up in the graybar hotel if any of the situations Lauren paints here actually do take place.
What part of speech is graybar hotel?
Graybar hotel is a noun.

Words near graybar hotel in the dictionary

  1. grayanotoxanes
  2. grayanotoxin
  3. grayanotoxins
  4. grayback
  5. graybacks
  6. graybar hotel
  7. graybar motel
  8. Graybeal
  9. Graybeals
  10. graybeard
  11. graybeards

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: graybar hotel (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: En-au-graybar hotel.ogg.

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