house detective
house detective noun: a person employed by a privately owned establishment, such as a hotel or large retail store, with the job of preventing wrongdoing and apprehending violators of laws or other regulations.
Noun
house detective (plural house detectives)
- A person employed by a privately owned establishment, such as a hotel or large retail store, with the job of preventing wrongdoing and apprehending violators of laws or other regulations.
- I went to Cloran, the house detective at the hotel here in New York where Deemer was murdered.1920, Frank L. Packard, chapter 21, in The White Moll
- I am usually uncomfortable in such five-star, five-diamond places. . . . I'm afraid I'll break something. Or be found out, collared by the house detective as an interloper unworthy of the surroundings.2005 April 24, Denis Horgan, “The scene of the South”, in Spartanburg Herald-Journal, US, retrieved 06 Feb 2010
Forms of house detective
| plural | house detectives |
|---|---|
| alternative form | house-detective |
Questions about house detective
- What does house detective mean?
- House detective means a person employed by a privately owned establishment, such as a hotel or large retail store, with the job of preventing wrongdoing and apprehending violators of laws or other regulations.
- What part of speech is house detective?
- House detective is a noun.
- What is the plural of house detective?
- The plural of house detective is house detectives.
Words near house detective in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: house detective (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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