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.
(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. Note: "In England people who have a drawing-room no longer call it a parlor, as they called it of old and till recently."
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