Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In Roman antiquity, a brothel.

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

  • noun A brothel.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin lupānar, from lupa ("prostitute"), literally ‘she-wolf’, from lupus ("wolf").

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Examples

  • Más vil que un lupanar la carnicería rubrica como una afrenta la calle.

    veruscio Diary Entry veruscio 2008

  • Agreste olus anus vendebat, et rogo inquam, mater, nunquid scis ubi ego habitem? delectata illa urbanitate tam stulta, et quid nesciam inquit? consurrexitque et cepit me praecedere; divinam ego putabam, &c. nudas video meretrices et in lupanar me adductum, sero execrutus aniculae insidias.

    Anatomy of Melancholy 2007

  • “Et ædificavissti tibi lupanar, et fecisti tibi prostibulum in cunctis plateis.” — “And thou hast built a high place for thyself, and a place of eminence in every public way.”

    A Philosophical Dictionary 2007

  • He was experiencing a sensation not unrelated to his mood in connection with the lupanar in Kansas City — attracted and yet repulsed.

    An American Tragedy 2004

  • Harris quickly catapults the reader into a world of striking authenticity with an armchair tour of Pompeii as it looked almost 2,000 years ago, including an aristocrat's sumptuous townhouse (the House of the Citharist, named after its statue of a lyre-playing Apollo), a lavishly designed new public baths facility (the Central Baths, uncompleted at the time of the eruption), and a dank two-story lupanar (the largest of at least nine brothels in Pompeii).

    Love Among the Ruins 2003

  • We next hear of her as servant-maid in a Piccadilly brothel, a lupanar much patronized by wealthy émigrés from France, among whom was Louis-Henri-Joseph, Duc de Bourbon and later Prince de Condé, a man at that time of about fifty-four.

    She Stands Accused 1935

  • On the morrow the palace of the Caesars was turned into a lupanar, a little larger, a little handsomer than the others, but still a brothel, one of which the inmates were matrons of Rome and the keeper Jupiter Latialis.

    Imperial Purple Edgar Saltus 1889

  • The Pantheon had become a lupanar of divinities that presided over birth, and whose rites were obscene; an abattoir of gods that presided over death, and whose worship was gore.

    Imperial Purple Edgar Saltus 1889

  • It is surely impossible for any impartial critic to contend that the unlucky novelist's devotion to the class of subjects referred to, and his manner of handling them, did not amount to what has been pedantically, but accurately, termed an "obsession of the _lupanar_."

    A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 To the Close of the 19th Century George Saintsbury 1889

  • It was a crime to undress before a statue of Augustus, to mention his name in the latrinae, to carry a coin with his image into a lupanar.

    Imperial Purple Edgar Saltus 1889

  • The lure of this forbidden history is what draws so many visitors to Pompeii’s brothel, called a lupanar (she-wolves’ den).

    Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age Annalee Newitz 2023

Comments

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  • ...some of their younger victims had to be hospitalized and removed to ordinary lupanars.

    - Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor

    June 3, 2008