'Parlour' definitions:

Definition of 'parlour'

noun

Reception room in an inn or club where visitors can be received [syn: parlor, parlour]

noun

A room in a private house or establishment where people can sit and talk and relax [syn: living room, living-room, sitting room, front room, parlor, parlour]

From: GCIDE

From: GCIDE

Parlor \Par"lor\, n. [OE. parlour, parlur, F. parloir, LL. parlatorium. See Parley.] [Written also parlour.]
1. A room for business or social conversation, for the reception of guests, etc. Specifically: (a) 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. --Piers Plowman. (b) 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. (c) Commonly, in the United States, a drawing-room, or the room where visitors are received and entertained; a room in a private house where people can sit and talk and relax, not usually the same as the dining room. [1913 Webster +PJC]
Note: "In England people who have a drawing-room no longer call it a parlor, as they called it of old and till recently." --Fitzed. Hall. [1913 Webster]
2. A room in an inn or club where visitors can be received. [WordNet 1.5]
Parlor car. See Palace car, under Car. [1913 Webster]

Parlour (from the Fr. parler, "to speak") denotes an "audience chamber," but that is not the import of the Hebrew word so rendered. It corresponds to what the Turks call a kiosk, as in Judg. 3:20 (the "summer parlour"), or as in the margin of the Revised Version ("the upper chamber of cooling"), a small room built on the roof of the house, with open windows to catch the breeze, and having a door communicating with the outside by which persons seeking an audience may be admitted. While Eglon was resting in such a parlour, Ehud, under pretence of having a message from God to him, was admitted into his presence, and murderously plunged his dagger into his body (21, 22).
The "inner parlours" in 1 Chr. 28:11 were the small rooms or chambers which Solomon built all round two sides and one end of the temple (1 Kings 6:5), "side chambers;" or they may have been, as some think, the porch and the holy place.
In 1 Sam. 9:22 the Revised Version reads "guest chamber," a chamber at the high place specially used for sacrificial feasts.