flophouse n.
1. a lodging house or night shelter for tramps, down-and-outs, alcoholics etc.
![]() | Spokane Press (WA) 22 Sept. 7/3: If I don’t cop a bundle of kale from this hike, you’ll find me kipping [...] at Hogan’s Flop. | |
![]() | Day Book (Chicago) 18 Mar. 14/1: ‘Just bummed this pill from a guy who was next to me in the flop,’replied the man. | |
![]() | (con. 1908) Adventures of a Woman Hobo 9: All the horrors of shivering nights in the open or in vermin-infested flop houses. | |
![]() | Hobo 30: ‘Flophouses’ are nearly all alike. Guests sleep on the floor or in bare, wooden bunks. | |
![]() | (con. 1920s) Studs Lonigan (1936) 520: Sinking lower and lower, living in a flophouse. | Judgement Day in|
![]() | (con. 1944) Naked and Dead 231: Red switches to a job as night clerk in one of the flophouses on the Bowery. | |
![]() | On The Road (1972) 162: We even visited some drunken seamen in a flophouse. | |
![]() | Last Exit to Brooklyn 108: When she crawled out of a flophouse she fell in the nearest bar. | |
![]() | Frying-Pan 97: At least we’ve found somewhere that’s not a flop-house we can send homeless men to. | |
![]() | Grass Arena (1990) 94: That’s why he liked to sleep alone. It also kept him free of the stale smell of flop-houses. | |
![]() | Lincoln Star (NE) 29 Dec. 6/4: Clusters of flops were known as ‘Skid Row’. | |
![]() | (con. 1920s) Legs 61: If things don’t work out you won’t have much trouble finding us if you check the flops on skid row. | |
![]() | Night Dogs 322: [A] flophouse where residents hung their clothes from the chicken-wire ceilings. | |
![]() | Guardian Rev. 10 July 11: Richard is on his first night in a flop-down Thai hostel. | |
![]() | Indep. Rev. 14 Feb. 7: Our various $5 dollar-a-night flophouses – where he had insisted on separate rooms. | |
![]() | Stingray Shuffle 166: He ended up living in a Reno flophouse working [...] as a dishwasher. | |
![]() | Way Home (2009) 272: It was not a plastic sheet flophouse, but it was close. | |
![]() | Viva La Madness 346: Morty drops me off a few streets away from the luxury flophouse. | |
![]() | ThugLit Sept. [ebook] Every massage parlor is a flophouse for the tuggers. | ‘Authenti City’ in|
![]() | California Bear 279: He’d long assumed it was a kind of flophouse for coked-up executives to impress young ingenues. |
2. attrib. use of sense 1.
![]() | Milk and Honey Route 172: He always sleeps in a four-bit bed and washes his own socks and shirt in the flop house wash-bowls. | |
![]() | Smashing Detective Stories Jan. 🌐 If he was a flophouse wino, he would have his passing printed near the classified ad sections. | ‘Dead Men Don’t Move’ in|
![]() | Who Live In Shadow (1960) 17: He is what is known around Junktown as a birdcage hype, a flophouse type. | |
![]() | Little Boy Blue (1995) 197: They found a wino leaning in the doorway of a flophouse hotel. | |
![]() | Homeboy 23: ‘Uncle!’ Joe had shouted, reaching for the flophouse ceiling. |
3. a cheap hotel.
![]() | Short Stories (1937) 183: Flop houses whose corridors were fouled with musty lavatory odors. | ‘Twenty-five Bucks’ in|
![]() | Steptoe and Son [TV script] I understand there’s a million flop-houses up around Earls Court. | ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’
4. a brothel.
![]() | in Schoolboy, Cowboy, Mexican Spy (1977) 52: My father was hanged as a horse thief. / My mother was burned as a witch. / My sisters ain’t fit f’r a flop house, / I’m a cow-punching son-of-a-bitch. | |
![]() | Riot (1967) 43: There was Duke Trusdale, a flop-house pimp. |
5. (Aus.) anywhere that resembles sense 1.
![]() | Between the Devlin 122: [B]eing back at home after that flophouse in Randwick. |