Brothel

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈbɹɔθəl/

Definitions

1. A house or establishment where people engage in sexual services for payment
2. A facility that serves as a location for transactions involving sexual acts in return for monetary payment
3. A place where individuals offer sexual services in exchange for money

Etymology: The word "brothel" once meant a person, not a place. In Middle English, a "brothel" was a wretch, a depraved man or woman, and only later did the term shift to describe the house where such people worked. The shift is captured in the full phrase "brothel-house," meaning "house of prostitution," which was shortened over time to "brothel" alone. Its ancestry runs back to an unrecorded Old English form, "brēoþel," meaning something like "degenerative, corruptive." It belongs to a family of Old English words built on "ābrēoþan," "to unsettle, degrade, ruin, or fall away," and "ābroþen," meaning "degenerate" or "base." All of these trace to a Proto-Germanic verb meaning "to fall apart; crumble," so the original sense was of something decaying or breaking down. The word's pronunciation is also unusual. Regular sound change would have produced a form like "broddle," rhyming with "fiddle," but the expected change from /ðl/ to /dl/ did not happen. Scholars suggest the schwa in its inflected forms, influence from the verb, or a dialect development may explain this, with a dialectal origin considered most likely.

Synonyms: whorehouse, house of ill repute, red-light district, bordello, cat house