Word.ws English Dictionary

passion pit

passion pit noun: a drive-in theatre or other unlit or dimly-lit secluded public or private location, with particular reference to it as a place of intimacy.

Noun

passion pit (plural passion pits)

  1. (slang) A drive-in theatre or other unlit or dimly-lit secluded public or private location, with particular reference to it as a place of intimacy.
    • The men who worked in it called it the Passion Pit in wry remembrance of other dark rooms they had known and used for more intimate and more enjoyable purposes...1952, Maxwell Griffith, Port of call, Lippincott, page 23
    • We gotta hide up some-place and let them lose us. Tell you what. There's a passion pit just where this comes out onto 95. Drive-in movie.1956, Ian Fleming, Diamonds are forever, Cape, page 145
  2. (slang) Any place where sexual activity commonly occurs.
    • As relationships mature, the bedroom gets de-coupled from its former role as a passion pit and instead becomes a place to zonk out, watch TV or work.1996, Sex: a man's guide, Rodale, page 163
    • Downstairs, it's The Nightclub - a large room with a funky semi-circular glowing blue bar, big comfy wall banquettes, a secluded circular passion pit in one corner, and a medium-size dance floor.2004, Donald Olson, Frommer's Vancouver & Victoria 2005, John Wiley and Sons, page 181

Examples of passion pit in a sentence

  • I don't have enough dough to take this chick to a passion pit.1959, “Theatre arts, Volume 43, Issue 6”, in Theatre Arts, Inc., page 39:
  • They won't have to brag about how far they went, and the mechanical, "plumbing" aspect of sex in the back seat at the passion pit may soon be a thing of the past.1971, Seymour Martin Lipset, Gerald M. Schaflander, Passion and politics: student activism in America, Little, Brown, page 277:
  • Instantly it became the most notorious passion pit we'd ever heard of.1996, William Gildea, When the Colts Belonged to Baltimore: A Father and a Son, a Team and a Time, JHU Press, page 172:
  • She wanted to see what the passion pit was all about, but I took her to supper and to South Pacific in Memphis rather than to Dragstrip Girl at our drive-in.2010, Carroll Osburn, The Edge of the Wedge: Recollections of a Reluctant Prodigal, AuthorHouse, page 211:

Forms of passion pit

pluralpassion pits

Questions about passion pit

What does passion pit mean?
Passion pit means a drive-in theatre or other unlit or dimly-lit secluded public or private location, with particular reference to it as a place of intimacy.
How do you use passion pit in a sentence?
I don't have enough dough to take this chick to a passion pit.
What part of speech is passion pit?
Passion pit is a noun.
What is the plural of passion pit?
The plural of passion pit is passion pits.

Words near passion pit in the dictionary

  1. passion fruit
  2. passion fruits
  3. passion killer
  4. passion killers
  5. passion of a convert
  6. passion pit
  7. passion pits
  8. passion play
  9. passion plays
  10. passion point
  11. passion points

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: passion pit (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-passion pit.ogg.

Cite this entry: “passion pit.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/passion_pit. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.