Word.ws English Dictionary

knocking shop

knocking shop noun: a brothel.

Noun

knocking shop (plural knocking shops)

  1. (Australia, New Zealand, UK, slang) A brothel.
    • [A]lways reminds me of one of the costlier knocking-shops, you know—'Maison Japonaise' …1945, Evelyn Waugh, “Epilogue”, in Brideshead Revisited […], London: Chapman & Hall, published 1952, →OCLC, page 300
    • Bloody nonsense, "All come together"... Sounds like the motto of a knocking shop in Marrakesh.1990, House of Cards, season 1, episode 1

Forms of knocking shop

pluralknocking shops
alternative formknocking-shop
alternative formknock shop
alternative formknock-shop

Questions about knocking shop

What does knocking shop mean?
Knocking shop means a brothel.
What part of speech is knocking shop?
Knocking shop is a noun.
What is the plural of knocking shop?
The plural of knocking shop is knocking shops.

Words near knocking shop in the dictionary

  1. knocking oneself out
  2. knocking out
  3. knocking out of the box
  4. knocking over
  5. knocking round
  6. knocking shop
  7. knocking shops
  8. knocking sideways
  9. knocking some sense into
  10. knocking someone down with a feather
  11. knocking someone flat

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: knocking shop (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-knocking shop.ogg.

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