Word.ws English Dictionary

leaping house

leaping house noun: a brothel.

Noun

leaping house (plural leaping houses)

  1. (obsolete) A brothel.
    • Unless hours were cups of sack and minutes capons and clocks the tongues of bawds and dials the signs of leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.c. 1597 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Fourth, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and...
    • In the late sixteenth century, the word nunnery also came to mean brothel. . . . Around the same time, the synonymous leaping-house also emerged, which anticipated the eighteenth-century terms vaulting-school and pushing-school, all implying vigorous acts of sex.2003, M. S. Morton, M. Morton, The Lover's Tongue: A Merry Romp Through the Language of Love and Sex, Insomniac Press,, →ISBN, page 221

Forms of leaping house

pluralleaping houses
alternative formleaping-house

Questions about leaping house

What does leaping house mean?
Leaping house means a brothel.
What part of speech is leaping house?
Leaping house is a noun.
What is the plural of leaping house?
The plural of leaping house is leaping houses.

Words near leaping house in the dictionary

  1. leaping
  2. leaping ahead
  3. leaping at
  4. leaping dandruff
  5. leaping for joy
  6. leaping house
  7. leaping houses
  8. leaping into action
  9. Leaping Lena
  10. leaping lizards
  11. leaping out

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: leaping 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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