[Ads-l] the slow, or fast, demise of the cat-house

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Interesting topic. Here is a start. Green's Dictionary of Slang (GDoS)
has an excellent entry for the noun cat-house. Here are the first and
last citations.

https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/moa5iyi

[Begin excerpt from GDoS]
cat-house n.
1. (US) a brothel.

1850 [US] Life in Boston & N.Y. (Boston, MA) 10 Aug. n.p.: The biggest
kind of cat house, including girls, pimp, French spring bed-steads,
three-dollar per bottle chapmagne (cider) and all the other fixin’s.
...
2020 [Aus] D. Whish-Wilson Shore Leave 29: ‘Every cathouse in every
port, you’ll find sliced pockets in the mattresses’.
[End excerpt from GDoS]

Google Books Ngram Viewer is a flawed but interesting tool for tracing
the popularity of words and phrases over time which you may already
know about.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/

The following graphs do not distinguish between the different senses
of "cat house".

The OED has three senses for cat-house:

(a) a movable pent-house used in early times by besiegers to protect
themselves in approaching fortifications
(b) a house for cats
(c) a bothel

Here is a pointer to the graph for "cat house"

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22cat+house%22&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3

Here is a pointer to the graph for "cathouse"

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cathouse&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3

Garson

On Mon, Jul 27, 2026 at 4:52 PM Martin Schneider
<000024dc089a88e9-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:
>
> Dialect enthusiasts!
>
> Fifteen or so years ago, I embarked on a project that involved tracking,
> and watching, the #1 movies, in sequence, starting from 1970. The movie had
> to be the listed box office winner in a given week, and the weeks supplied
> the chronology. As I watched these movies, I noticed this term that is no
> longer in use. It came up in multiple movies. "Cat house," to mean,
> bordello, brothel, a place where women of ill repute are available, that
> sort of thing.
>
> "What'ya think you're doing, this isn't a cat house!" Such lines were
> littered across the 1970 set of movies.
>
> Obviously, the term stood out for not really existing in our time. What
> happened to it? Where did it come from? When did it die? These are things
> we could track.
>
> Thanks,
> Martin
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org