Definition
1. Physical premises. A place or room where clothes or linens are washed, whether a commercial establishment, a domestic room, or a service facility. In the traditional legal sense, a laundry is a physical business engaged in washing garments or textiles for compensation.
2. Commercial laundry as a regulated business. In municipal law, zoning law, and public health regulation, a laundry is a commercial enterprise subject to licensing, land-use restrictions, and sanitation requirements. Early American courts and legislatures addressed laundries extensively in the context of police power regulations — particularly the operation of laundries in residential areas and the licensing of laundry businesses, which generated significant constitutional litigation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
3. Colloquial shorthand for money laundering. In modern legal and investigative contexts, "laundry" or "laundromat" is informal shorthand for a business used to conceal the origins of illegally obtained funds — a usage derived from the Wiktionary sense and widely understood in law enforcement, though not a formal term of art. The formal legal term is money laundering.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A place or room where laundering is done; that which needs to be laundered; a business whose primary purpose is to conceal the origins of illegally received money.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A laundering; a washing. A place or room where laundering is done.
The gap between common and legal meaning operates in two directions. First, in historical legal sources, "laundry" is almost always a land-use or licensing term — a physical business premises — not a domestic activity. Second, in contemporary usage, the word has acquired a secondary colloquial meaning tied to financial crime that does not appear in formal legal doctrine; the operative legal term there is money laundering, not laundry.
Common Confusion
"Laundry" as informal shorthand for a money-laundering front business is frequently encountered in journalism, law enforcement reports, and colloquial legal writing. Researchers should not treat this usage as a term of art. The formal doctrine — elements, offenses, defenses — lives under money laundering, not laundry. When searching historical legal sources, "laundry" will return land-use, licensing, and public health cases, not financial crime materials.
Why It Matters in Research
The legal significance of "laundry" is almost entirely historical and municipal. The late nineteenth century produced substantial litigation over the regulation of commercial laundries, most famously in the context of San Francisco ordinances that courts evaluated under the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection guarantee. Researchers working on police power doctrine, discriminatory municipal licensing, or the origins of constitutional limits on commercial regulation will find laundry cases to be an important and sometimes underappreciated body of authority in that era.
In zoning and land-use research, "laundry" appears as a defined use category in municipal codes and zoning ordinances throughout the twentieth century. The distinction between hand laundries, steam laundries, self-service laundromats, and dry-cleaning establishments has legal significance in many local regulatory schemes.
For researchers using the Law Mind corpus, be alert to the following traps: (1) searches for "laundry" in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century materials will retrieve regulatory and licensing cases, not financial crime materials; (2) searches for money laundering doctrine must use "money laundering" or the relevant statutory terms, not "laundry"; (3) Bouvier's sparse entry reflects that the term was treated as self-evident — a physical place — and that the legal complexity was embedded in the cases applying police power analysis to laundry businesses, not in the definition itself.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides only a single-sentence definition — "a place where clothes are washed" — supported by a Kentucky citation (105 Ky. 265, 49 S.W. 28). This brevity is characteristic of terms Bouvier's treated as factual or physical rather than legal. The definition captures the core meaning but gives no indication of the significant constitutional and regulatory case law that had developed around laundry businesses by the time later editions were published.
The Webster's 1913 definition is essentially identical to Bouvier's: a place or room where laundering is done. Neither historical source anticipates the financial-crime usage, which developed in common parlance in the mid-to-late twentieth century and entered formal legal doctrine through money laundering statutes.
What historical sources miss: the extensive police power and equal protection litigation surrounding commercial laundry regulation, which is more accurately located by searching case law than by relying on dictionary entries.
Jurisdictional Note
Regulation of commercial laundries is a matter of state and local law, with significant variation in licensing requirements, zoning classifications, and environmental rules. Constitutional challenges to laundry ordinances were litigated at both state and federal levels in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and researchers should not assume uniformity across jurisdictions.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Money Laundering for the financial crime doctrine that has absorbed the secondary modern meaning of this term. For the historical police power context, see Police Power and Zoning and Land Use in the Law Mind Encyclopedia.