Madhouse
noun ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A house where insane persons are confined; an insane asylum. obsolete
"The palace, the night-cellar, the jail, the madhouse: the chambers of birth and death, of health and sickness, the rigid face of the corpse and the calm sleep of the child: midnight was upon them all."
- 2 pejorative terms for an insane asylum wordnet
- 3 A chaotic, uproarious, noisy place. broadly, figuratively
"This taut, soldierly, professional story is something of a stranger among American novels about war making. Angry civilians have writ ten most of the best fiction on the subject, from “Three Soldiers” through “Catch‐22,” to make the point (with a good deal of literary overkill) that wars are mass insanity and that armies are madhouses."
Example
More examples"It's not a madhouse. It's a clinic for the mentally unstable."
Etymology
From mad + house.
Related phrases
More for "madhouse"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.