seraglio /se-RAHL-yoh/. noun. An enclosure used for confinement, most often for a harem or polygamous unit. For Muslim nobles, the rooms or apartments reserved for wives and concubines. Or the harem itself. Sometimes, more generally, a Muslim noble house or palace as a whole. Sometimes, more generally, a brothel. From Italian serraglio(an enclosure or animal cage), from Latin sera (door bar), related to Turkish seray(palace).
“During his residence at Marlow, the enemies of Mr. Shelley spread a report that he was keeping a seraglio, an opinion that was somewhat strengthened by some peculiar notions he was known to entertain with regard to marriage.” (derived from Leigh Hunt)
“We have been taught to tremble at the terrific visages of murdering janisaries; and to blush at the unveiled mysteries of a future seraglio.” (Alexander Hamilton)
“She was wearing a tasselled shawl affair and a voluminous velvet dress the colour of old blood, and both arms were busy almost to the elbows with fine gold bangles, like a set of springs, which suggested the circus ring more than the seraglio.” (John Banville)
“I live in an interesting house at McLean’s Hospital, one which no man had entered since 1860; suddenly it was made co-ed. It was like entering some ancient deceased sultan’s seraglio.” (Robert Lowell)
“Nancy had expected the cabin to be dominated by a bed, possibly in the shape of a swan, but the Marlin was a day boat. The cabin was anything but a seraglio. It was about as voluptuous as a lower-middle-class dining room in Akron, Ohio, around 1910.” (Kurt Vonnegut)
“In the other room the TV was blaring a commercial for a Turkish bath in downtown San Narciso, wherever downtown was, called Hogan’s Seraglio.” (Thomas Pynchon)
“Are you reading or daydreaming? Do the effusions of a graphomane have such power over you? Are you also dreaming of the petroliferous Sultana? Do you envy the lot of the man decanting novels in the seraglios of Arabia?” (Italo Calvino)
“Only crazy women ever fall in love with young insurance solicitors, but every young clergyman, if he is so inclined, may have a whole seraglio.” (H.L. Mencken)
“I have often thought that if I kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear linen gowns, or cotton. I mean stuffs made of vegetables substances. I would have no silk; you cannot tell when it is clean.” (Samuel Johnson)
“Who was she?” ¶ “Oh,” Mr. Colleoni said vaguely, “one of those foreign polonies.” He plucked a flower and stuck it in his buttonhole, and something a little doggish peeped out of the black buttony eyes, a hint of the seraglio.” (Graham Greene)
“In place of the jeering crowd calling for the crucifixion of Jesus there is, predictably, his seraglio, etched in as many styles as he had had lovers and wives.” (Simon Schama)
“The room smelled of women, tasted of them, of their perfumes and balms, their scented candles and incense and the things they wore close to their bodies, and it was orderly when the rest of the house was in disarray. And dark, dark and candlelit, even in the middle of the day, with sheets of cardboard and posters nailed up over the windows. Norm called it the seraglio.” (T.C. Boyle)
“The insurgents and rebels wore very short hair. Turkey, falling into the same chaos of rebellion, provided the fashionable world with coiffures supposed to be modelled on what people imagined of the seraglio.” (Doris Lessing)
“In my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom, postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves.” (Vladimir Nabokov)
“Squadrons and squares of men in brazen plates,
Scaffolds, still sheets of water, divers woes,
Ranges of glimmering vaults with iron grates,
And hush’d seraglios.”
(Alfred Lord Tennyson)