pump room

See also: pumproom and pump-room

English

Alternative forms

pumproom, pump-room

Noun

pump room (plural pump rooms)

(sometimes capitalized) A room housing a pump, especially a room or structure at a spa where mineral water is drawn from a spring and consumed, formerly often serving as a venue for polite socializing and conversation. [from 18th c.]
- 1751, [Tobias] Smollett, chapter 75, in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle […], volume II, London: Harrison and Co., […], →OCLC:
  Among those who frequented the pump-room, was an old officer, whose temper, naturally impatient, was, by repeated attacks of the gout, which had almost deprived him of the use of his limbs, sublimated into a remarkable degree of virulence and perverseness […] .
- 1836 March – 1837 October, Charles Dickens, chapter 36, in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1837, →OCLC:
  The Great Pump Room is a spacious saloon, ornamented with Corinthian pillars, and a music-gallery, and a Tompion clock, and a statue of Nash, and a golden inscription, to which all the water-drinkers should attend, for it appeals to them in the cause of a deserving charity.
- 1847, Hans Christian Andersen, chapter 7, in Mary Howitt, transl., The True Story of My Life:
  [E]ven the German visitors at the baths honored me by drinking my health in the pump-room.
- 2003 August 10, Jacqueline Friedrich, “Choice Tables: Sophisticated Repasts in Bath”, in New York Times, retrieved 9 October 2012:
  In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the beautiful people came here for the season, taking the waters, meeting for tea in the Pump Room and for balls in the Assembly Rooms.

References

“pump room”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.