PURLIEU • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Purlieu

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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."

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Etymology of 'Purlieu'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Purlieu" Quotes from Famous Books

... he would reproach himself for ever after if he refused. So they set off. On the way the curious irresolution and sudden determination of the sacristan recurred to Dennistoun, and he wondered in a shamefaced way whether he was being decoyed into some purlieu to be made away with as a supposed rich Englishman. He contrived, therefore, to begin talking with his guide, and to drag in, in a rather clumsy fashion, the fact that he expected two friends to join him early the next morning. To his surprise, ...

— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James

... down every half-minute, in spite of cinders lavished by the authority, and can't really see its way to locomotion when it gets up. So you may just as well walk. Sally did so, and in ten minutes reached the queer little purlieu teeming with the well-connected, and named after the great Mysteries they are connected with, that lies in the angle of Park Lane and Piccadilly. Persons of exaggerated sense of locality or mature hereditary experience can make short cuts through this district, but the wayfarer (broadly speaking) ...

— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... 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

... arise, and vanish with the waning of a moon. What would this, or any other country, become, were law, order, the police and every restraining influence made absolutely inefficient? Were California one state today; a dozen next week; in July six or seven, and next December but a purlieu to Arizona?—Things, heaven knows, are bad enough as they are; there is no dearth of crime and cheatery. Still, the police and the legal system do stand between us and red riot and ruin. In China they ...

— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... 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