madhouse

Noun

madhouse (plural madhouses)

1. (obsolete) A house where insane persons are confined; an insane asylum.
   • The palace, the night-cellar, the jail, the madhouse: the chambers of birth and death, of health and sickness, the rigid face of the corpse and the calm sleep of the child: midnight was upon them all.1838, Boz [pseudonym; Charles Dickens], Oliver Twist; […], volume (please specify |volume=I, II, or III), London: Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC
   • The king experienced his first attack in autumn 1788, and as his condition worsened and the physicians-in-ordinary proved unable to cope or cure, the Reverend Dr Francis Willis (1717–1807), a clergyman doctor who ran a madhouse in Lincolnshire, was called in.1997, Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, Folio Society, published 2016, page 263

   Synonyms:

   insane asylum, mental hospital, bedlam, bin, booby-hatch, booby house, bughouse, crazy house, cuckoo's nest, funny farm

2. (broadly, figuratively) A chaotic, uproarious, noisy place.
   • This taut, soldierly, professional story is something of a stranger among American novels about war making. Angry civilians have writ ten most of the best fiction on the subject, from “Three Soldiers” through “Catch‐22,” to make the point (with a good deal of literary overkill) that wars are mass...1970 September 13, Robie MacAuley, “The Army as one of life's awful necessities”, in The New York Times