Bridewell
- n. A house of correction for the confinement of disorderly persons; — so called from a hospital built in 1553 near St. Bride’s (or Bridget’s) well, in London, which was subsequently a penal workhouse.
The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.