Cardhouse
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A business establishment that hosts card-playing, especially one where patrons play poker. countable
""Twas first to the cardhouse and then down to Maisie's," intoned that mournful ballad "The Cowboy's Lament." But most real-life trail riders went first to the bathtub and then to the haberdasher, if only because neither Maisie nor the cardhouse would truly welcome a man so long as he had the look and smell of a summer in the saddle."
- 2 an unstable construction with playing cards wordnet
- 3 A structure of plate-like mineral deposits that rest on each other's edges. attributive, uncountable
"He also expressed the opinion that certain sensitive clays derived their properties from the fact that the flaky minerals were arranged in an unstable “cardhouse” fabric."
- 4 Synonym of house of cards (any sense). countable
"The photographer glanced up at them over a four-storeyed cardhouse, which he had built out of crispbread."
Example
More examples""Twas first to the cardhouse and then down to Maisie's," intoned that mournful ballad "The Cowboy's Lament." But most real-life trail riders went first to the bathtub and then to the haberdasher, if only because neither Maisie nor the cardhouse would truly welcome a man so long as he had the look and smell of a summer in the saddle."
Etymology
From card + house. Piecewise doublet of charthouse.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.