Definition of "lying-in" []

• The condition of a woman in the process of giving birth. (noun)
• Of or intended for use during childbirth: a lying-in hospital. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The visitor, fascinated by the man's passion and occasional lucidity, discovers that he was a doctor at the lying-in wards of the General Hospital: Professor Ignaz Semmelweiss, who ran afoul of his colleagues by insisting that the very high incidence of fatal childbed fever could be checked if the doctors washed their hands before examining the patients."
• "I did not see what good an unmarried gentlewoman would be at a lying-in, but I did not argue."
• "Such derangement may begin any time after conception, and may end after delivery or continue after birth, wrote physician George Man Burrows in 1828; some women “are insane on every pregnancy or lying-in, others only occasionally.”"