Definition
A common gambling house is a place habitually used for unlawful gambling — whether by betting on cards, dice, sporting events, or speculative price movements in commodities and securities — where the recurring nature of the activity and the openness of access to participants defines the offense. The term is a creature of criminal law, designating not merely a single act of gambling but a premises regularly devoted to it.
The classic formulation, carried in Bouvier, focuses on a specific commercial variant: establishments where persons habitually assemble to wager on the prospective rise and fall in prices of stocks, bonds, grain, or similar instruments. This targets bucket shops and exchange-style gambling dens rather than traditional gaming houses, recognizing that speculative price-betting was a widespread and particularly contested form of gambling in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The word "common" in this phrase does not mean ordinary. It carries its older legal sense: open to the public, habitual, and notorious — the same usage found in "common scold," "common nuisance," or "common carrier." A house of gambling visited once or by private arrangement would not satisfy the definition; the offense requires a pattern of use and some degree of public accessibility.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Common" in everyday speech means ordinary, widespread, or shared. A "gambling house" is simply a place where gambling occurs.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Common" carried the sense of belonging to or affecting the public generally, or occurring habitually. Webster's also recognized "common" as a legal qualifier denoting public or habitual character in compound terms.
The gap matters. A researcher encountering "common gambling house" in a historical indictment or statute may read it as merely describing a typical gambling establishment. In law, "common" is a term of art that supplies the habitual and public elements required for the criminal offense. Without those elements, the charge fails — the word is doing legal work, not descriptive work.
Core Elements
To constitute a common gambling house, historical authorities generally required:
1. A place or premises — a physical location, though courts extended this to temporary or movable sites in some jurisdictions.
2. Habitual use — not a single occasion but a pattern of repeated assembly for gambling purposes.
3. Public accessibility — some degree of openness, such that persons beyond the proprietor and a closed private circle could participate or resort to the premises.
4. Unlawful gambling activity — the wagering itself must be of the kind prohibited by law; lawful gaming establishments are a separate category.
In the bucket-shop variant specifically identified by Bouvier, the gambling took the form of wagering on price movements rather than actual purchases and sales of securities or grain — a distinction courts drew carefully to separate legitimate exchange transactions from gambling contracts.
Why It Matters in Research
The term appears with some frequency in late nineteenth and early twentieth century criminal indictments, nuisance proceedings, and police court records. Researchers working in this period need to know two things.
First, "common gambling house" is a charge that encompasses both traditional gaming houses (faro banks, policy shops, dice rooms) and bucket shops. These were treated as the same legal category in many jurisdictions even though their social character and regulatory context were quite different. An indictment for keeping a common gambling house may therefore be evidence of either type of operation — the charge alone does not tell you which.
Second, the line between a common gambling house and a legitimate commodities or securities exchange was actively litigated throughout this period. Courts in different states drew the line differently, and what was prosecuted in one jurisdiction as a common gambling house might operate openly as a board of trade in another. Statutes targeting bucket shops sometimes used "common gambling house" as a defined term, sometimes created a separate offense. Checking the governing statute is essential before assuming that a source's use of the phrase maps onto the Bouvier definition.
The "habitual assembly" requirement also created evidentiary complexity in historical cases. A single raid on a gambling premises was often insufficient to establish the common gambling house offense; prosecutors frequently needed to prove pattern and notoriety. This shaped how police and court records documented these cases, and researchers reading those records should be alert to the difference between a charge of gambling and a charge of keeping a common gambling house.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the sole source in this corpus, and its entry is spare — essentially a single-sentence definition supported by a Kentucky citation. The definition tracks the bucket-shop variant specifically, which reflects Bouvier's late-edition attention to financial gambling rather than the full breadth of the common law concept.
What Bouvier does not address: the traditional gaming house dimension of the term, the nuisance theory under which common gambling houses were sometimes abated in equity, or the question of what physical or organizational form a "house" must take. Earlier common law authorities treated keeping a common gaming house as a public nuisance indictable at common law, independent of any statute — a dimension entirely absent from the Bouvier entry.
Jurisdictional Note
Many states codified "common gambling house" as a specific statutory offense by the late nineteenth century, sometimes with definitions that diverged from the common law formulation. Others prosecuted the same conduct under general gambling statutes or nuisance law without using the term. The term's presence or absence in a jurisdiction's statutes is not a reliable guide to whether the underlying conduct was unlawful there.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Gambling Offenses
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Public Nuisance
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Bucket Shops and Speculative Contracts