playhouse n.
1. a brothel.
![[UK]](/static/img/flags/uk.png "United Kingdom") | ‘Prodigals Resolution’ in Pills to Purge Melancholy I 60: In Play-houses I’ll spend my days, / For they’re hung round with Plackets; / Ladies make Room, behold I come, / Have at your Knocking Jackets. |
2. a casino.
| Satirist (London) 17 Jan. 7/1: From play-houses of a legitimate character I nightly find my way to play-houses of an illegitimate kind, and although I seldom play. |
3. (US Und.) a prison known for its liberal regime, also attrib.
![[US]](/static/img/flags/us.png "United States") | Helena Wkly Herald (MT) 24 July 7/2: It was worse than boy’s play for the Sheriff to attempt to keep such a villain as Con Murphy [...] with known sympathizers on the outside, in such a play-house as the city jail. | |
| Abbeville Press & Banner (SC) 13 June 6/5: The jail is no playhouse [...] smnall cells with bars and [...] the hardest of beds. | |
| Wash. Herald (DC) 7 May 6/6: [By] removing the playhouse features from the District jail [he] tightened up the former lax discipline. | |
| You Can’t Win (2000) 93: The food was fair. There was no discipline [...] In prison parlance, the place was a ‘playhouse’. | |
| Chicago May (1929) 261: Playhouse—easy prison. | |
| et al. DAUL 160/1: Playhouse. (P) Any prison in which discipline is less rigorous and living conditions more congenial than in most prisons. |
4. (US prison) a small prison.
| Prison Community (1940) 334/2: play house, n. A prison with a small population. | |
| You Chirped a Chinful!! n.p.: Jail [...] Playhouse. |
5. (US Und.) ext. to non-prison contexts, e.g. a town with little law and order.
| High Sierra in Four Novels (1984) 393: I thought this town was a playhouse. That’s what I heard in Chio. |
6. (US gay) a room filled with implements to augment sado-masochistic sex.
| Queens’ Vernacular 184: torture room [...] playhouse. |