PURLIEU • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Purlieu

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

Listen

noun

Purlieu n. (Written also pourlieu)

Originally, the ground near a royal forest, which, having been unlawfully added to the forest, was afterwards severed from it, and disafforested so as to remit to the former owners their rights. "Then as a tiger, who by chance hath spied In some purlieu two gentle fawns at play."

Hence, the outer portion of any place; an adjacent district; environs; neighborhood. "The purlieus of St. James." "brokers had been incessantly plying for custom in the purlieus of the court."

See images of 'Purlieu'

Etymology of 'Purlieu'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Purlieu" Quotes from Famous Books

... me to this spectacle felt its inadequacy so keenly, in spite of my protests, that he questioned the policemen for some very squalid or depraved purlieu that he might show me, for we were in the very heart of Whitechapel, but failing that, because the region had been so very much reformed and cleaned up since the dreadful murders there, he had no recourse but to take me on top of a tram-car and ...

— London Films • W.D. Howells

... consists in that part that is best able to com- prehend it, that immortal essence, that translated divinity and colony of God, the soul. Surely, though we place hell under earth, the devil's walk and purlieu is about it. Men speak too popularly who place it in those flaming mountains, which to grosser apprehensions re- present hell. The heart of man is the place the devils dwell in; I feel sometimes a hell within myself; ...

— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne

... my second year, 1885, that returning from an out-patient case one night, I turned into a large tent erected in a purlieu of Shadwell, the district to which I happened to have been called. It proved to be an evangelistic meeting of the then famous Moody and Sankey. It was so new to me that when a tedious prayer-bore began ...

— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

Words linked to "Purlieu" : geographic region, geographical region