Definition
A tippling house is an establishment where intoxicating liquors are sold by the dram or in small quantities to be consumed on the premises. The term describes what would today be called a tavern, saloon, or bar — a place where individuals gather for the purpose of drinking. The defining features are retail sale of alcohol in small measures and on-premises consumption, as distinguished from a wholesale liquor dealer or a shop selling sealed containers for off-premises use.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Tippling" refers to the habitual drinking of alcohol, especially to excess. A tippler is one who drinks regularly or immoderately.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Tippling house" is defined as a house where liquors are sold in small quantities and consumed on the premises; a place of resort for drinkers.
The gap between common and legal meaning is narrow but worth noting. Common usage frames "tippling" as a personal habit — something a drinker does — while the legal term "tippling house" shifts focus entirely to the premises and its operator. In law, the term was a regulatory and penal designation, not merely a descriptive one. Operating a tippling house without a license, or operating one at all in a jurisdiction that prohibited them, was a specific criminal offense. The moral connotation of excess embedded in the word "tippling" carried over into the law: these establishments were treated with suspicion by courts and legislatures, and the term itself appears most frequently in licensing statutes, nuisance ordinances, and criminal indictments rather than in neutral commercial contexts.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily a historical artifact. Researchers will encounter it in 19th-century American statutes, municipal ordinances, grand jury indictments, and appellate decisions dealing with liquor licensing, public nuisance, and criminal law. It largely disappears from legal usage after Prohibition-era reforms reorganized the vocabulary of alcohol regulation around terms like "retail liquor dealer," "tavern," "on-sale license," and later "dram shop."
Several research traps apply:
First, the term is jurisdiction-sensitive in application even if consistent in meaning. Some states used "tippling house" in their criminal codes as a standalone offense (keeping a disorderly tippling house); others embedded it within broader licensing frameworks where the offense was operating without a license. The distinction matters when tracing what conduct was actually prohibited and what penalties attached.
Second, researchers should not assume that "tippling house" and "tavern" or "inn" were legally interchangeable in historical sources. Inns and taverns often carried distinct licensing regimes, lodging obligations, and common-law duties to travelers. A tippling house was a narrower, more pejorative category — a drinking place without the respectability of an inn. Courts and prosecutors sometimes made the distinction explicit.
Third, the term connects directly to the 19th-century temperance movement's influence on legislation. Statutes using this language often reflect moral reform impulses as much as regulatory purpose, and the case law applying these statutes can turn on the line between legitimate regulation and prohibition in disguise — a constitutionally significant distinction in the Lochner era.
Fourth, the term will appear in municipal law research. Many city charters and ordinances gave municipalities specific authority (or specific prohibitions) regarding tippling houses, and contested ordinances generated appellate litigation on the scope of local police power. The Illinois and Kansas cases cited in Black's 2nd edition are examples of this genre.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary offer essentially identical definitions, differing only in the supporting citations added in the second edition. The core formulation — sale of intoxicating drinks by the dram or small quantities, for consumption on the premises, as a place of resort for drinking — is consistent across both and tracks the contemporary case law.
The second edition's citation expansion is useful to researchers: it points to decisions from Georgia (Leesburg v. Putnam; Hussey v. State), Kentucky (Morrison v. Commonwealth), Illinois (Patten v. Centralia), and Kansas (Emporia v. Volmer), illustrating that the term had currency across multiple jurisdictions and legal contexts, including municipal regulation, criminal prosecution, and the limits of local licensing authority.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the term's decline. Neither edition signals that this vocabulary was already giving way to more administrative and less moralistic terminology by the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A researcher who finds the term only in early sources and then loses it should understand that the underlying legal problem — regulating retail alcohol sales for on-premises consumption — persisted and was eventually absorbed into modern liquor licensing law under different vocabulary.
No historical legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus provides a substantively different or competing definition. This is a case of consistent historical usage rather than contested meaning.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term appeared in the statutes and case law of states across the South, Midwest, and border regions throughout the 19th century. Southern and border states (Georgia, Kentucky) often prosecuted keeping a tippling house as a standalone criminal offense; Midwestern states (Illinois, Kansas) more commonly addressed the term through municipal licensing authority. Researchers working in New England or the mid-Atlantic states may find the term less common in those corpora, where "tavern" and "inn" dominated the regulatory vocabulary.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry directly addresses tippling houses, historical liquor licensing, or 19th-century alcohol regulation. The matched encyclopedia entries concern fair housing and inclusionary zoning and are not relevant to this term. This section is omitted.
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