Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Offensive An institution for the mentally ill.
  • noun Informal A place of great disorder and confusion.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A house where insane persons are confined for cure or for restraint; a lunatic asylum; a bedlam.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun An house or institution where insane persons are confined; an insane asylum; a bedlam; -- usually used in a deprecatory sense.
  • noun A chaotic, raucus or highly disordered situation.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A house where insane persons are confined; an insane asylum
  • noun A place exhibiting stereotypical characteristics of such a house.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun pejorative terms for an insane asylum

Etymologies

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Examples

  • The madhouse was the old Manor House in Clerkenwell which had belonged to the Earls of Northampton.

    Bedlam Catharine Arnold 2008

  • The madhouse was the old Manor House in Clerkenwell which had belonged to the Earls of Northampton.

    Bedlam Catharine Arnold 2008

  • The madhouse was the old Manor House in Clerkenwell which had belonged to the Earls of Northampton.

    Bedlam Catharine Arnold 2008

  • Divil a word I’d forget, and your face grinning always in front of my eyes, awake or asleep, ’til I do be thinking a madhouse is the proper place for me.

    Act IV. Anna Christie 1922

  • "A madhouse is the place for the man who wants to live ou'doors in the winter time; the poor-farm is too good for him."

    The Village Watch-Tower Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin 1889

  • A private launch event on Wednesday at New York's Time Square was reportedly described as a "madhouse," with celebs such as Emma Roberts, Camilla Belle and Rachel Zoe in attendance.

    CNN.com 2011

  • A private launch event on Wednesday at New York's Time Square was reportedly described as a "madhouse," with celebs such as Emma Roberts, Camilla Belle and Rachel Zoe in attendance.

    CNN.com 2011

  • Learning that she is to be lobotomized in five days, Baby Doll soars or plunges into an alternate reality where the madhouse is a high-end whorehouse and her fellow inmates are her brothel sisters, ready to join her in a five-part quest that could lead to their freedom.

    TIME.com: Top Stories 2011

  • Can you imagine 5 days in the madhouse, that is the emergency ward in Surrey Memorial Hospital?

    Kootenay Rockies - News 2009

  • The only voice of anything approaching reason inside the madhouse is his Executive Officer, Royal Air Force Group-Captain Lionel Mandrake (one of Peter Sellers 'three brilliant roles in the movie), who does everything he can - from cajoling to confrontation to cooperation - to make Ripper see sense, divulge the recall code, stop babbling that he "can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

    Tony Hendra: That Special Blair Bush Relationship; Shades of Doctor Strangelove. 2008

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  • dom wariatów

    May 19, 2011