parlor

A room in a private home set apart for the entertainment of visitors.

A small lounge or sitting room affording limited privacy, as at an inn or tavern.

A room equipped and furnished for a special function or business.

Originally, a room set apart from the great hall for private conference and conversation; a withdrawing-room. It finally became the public room of a private house. See def. 3.

An apartment in a convent, asylum, inn, hospital, hotel, boarding-school, or the like, in which the inmates are permitted to meet and converse with visitors.

A room in a private house set apart for the conversational entertainment of guests; a reception-room; a drawing-room; also, in Great Britain, the common sitting-room or keeping-room of a family, as distinguished from a drawing-room intended for the reception of company.

Vulgarly, any room more or less “elegantly” or showily furnished or fitted up, and devoted to some specific purpose: as, tonsorial parlors; a photographer’s parlors; oyster parlors; misfit parlors.

A room for business or social conversation, for the reception of guests, etc.

The apartment in a monastery or nunnery where the inmates are permitted to meet and converse with each other, or with visitors and friends from without.

In large private houses, a sitting room for the family and for familiar guests, — a room for less formal uses than the drawing-room. Esp., in modern times, the dining room of a house having few apartments, as a London house, where the dining parlor is usually on the ground floor.