CIRCULATING LIBRARY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does circulating library mean? 

• CIRCULATING LIBRARY (noun)
  The noun CIRCULATING LIBRARY has 1 sense:

1. library that provides books for use outside the building

  Familiarity information: CIRCULATING LIBRARY used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• CIRCULATING LIBRARY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Library that provides books for use outside the building

Classified under:

Nouns denoting man-made objects

Synonyms:

circulating library; lending library

Hypernyms ("circulating library" is a kind of...):

depository library; library (a depository built to contain books and other materials for reading and study)

 Context examples 

There were none in her father's house; but wealth is luxurious and daring, and some of hers found its way to a circulating library.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

Mr. Collins readily assented, and a book was produced; but, on beholding it (for everything announced it to be from a circulating library), he started back, and begging pardon, protested that he never read novels.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

In it she kept her papers, and a few books, safely shut away from Scrabble, who, being likewise of a literary turn, was fond of making a circulating library of such books as were left in his way by eating the leaves.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

You talked of expected horrors in London—and instead of instantly conceiving, as any rational creature would have done, that such words could relate only to a circulating library, she immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George's Fields, the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood, a detachment of the Twelfth Light Dragoons (the hopes of the nation) called up from Northampton to quell the insurgents, and the gallant Captain Frederick Tilney, in the moment of charging at the head of his troop, knocked off his horse by a brickbat from an upper window.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)