parlor

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. A room in a private home set apart for the entertainment of visitors.
2. n. A small lounge or sitting room affording limited privacy, as at an inn or tavern.
3. n. A room equipped and furnished for a special function or business: a tanning parlor.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. Originally, a room set apart from the great hall for private conference and conversation; a withdrawing-room. It finally became the public room of a private house. See def. 3.
2. n. An apartment in a convent, asylum, inn, hospital, hotel, boarding-school, or the like, in which the inmates are permitted to meet and converse with visitors.
3. n. A room in a private house set apart for the conversational entertainment of guests; a reception-room; a drawing-room; also, in Great Britain, the common sitting-room or keeping-room of a family, as distinguished from a drawing-room intended for the reception of company. In the United States, where the word drawing-room is little used, parlor is the general term for the room used for the reception of guests.
4. n. Vulgarly, any room more or less “elegantly” or showily furnished or fitted up, and devoted to some specific purpose: as, tonsorial parlors; a photographer's parlors; oyster parlors; misfit parlors.

Wiktionary

1. n. A covered open-air patio.
2. n. A room for lounging (especially for reading); a sitting-room; a drawing room.
3. n. archaic The apartment in a monastery or nunnery where the inmates are permitted to meet and converse with each other, or with visitors and friends from the outside.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. A room for business or social conversation, for the reception of guests, etc.
2. n. The apartment in a monastery or nunnery where the inmates are permitted to meet and converse with each other, or with visitors and friends from without.
3. n. In large private houses, a sitting room for the family and for familiar guests, -- a room for less formal uses than the drawing-room. Esp., in modern times, the dining room of a house having few apartments, as a London house, where the dining parlor is usually on the ground floor.
4. n. Commonly, in the United States, a drawing-room, or the room where visitors are received and entertained; a room in a private house where people can sit and talk and relax, not usually the same as the dining room.
5. n. A room in an inn or club where visitors can be received.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. reception room in an inn or club where visitors can be received
2. n. a room in a private house or establishment where people can sit and talk and relax