Dictionary

finishing school en · NOUN

Meanings

1. (dated) A private school intended to furnish young women with the social skills and cultural education needed in order to fulfill successfully a woman's traditional role in polite society.
   • "All she needs is a year or two at a fashionable finishing school, so that at eighteen she can come out with éclat," put in Aunt Clara. 1875, Louisa M[ay] Alcott, chapter 4, in Eight Cousins:
   • Until the 1920s, most European high schools for girls were finishing schools. 1998, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, Nobel Prize Women in Science, Carol Publishing Group, page 3:
   • On the advice of a well-heeled friend from Indonesia, she then decamped to Switzerland to attend the Institut Villa Pierrefeu. “They call it ‘the finishing school that refuses to be finished,’” Ms. Ho explained, the last in a dying form of pedagogy that asks wealthy women to scrutinize the folds in napkins with an intensity akin to Watson and Crick studying the double helix. 2023 January 2, Maureen O’Connor, “The Etiquette Guru Who Broke Up With a Boyfriend Over Text”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:

Forms

Synonyms

charm school

Translations (7)

ru институ́т благоро́дных деви́ц (a private school intended to furnish young women with the social skills and cultural education needed in order to fulfill successfully a woman's traditional role in polite society) · de Mädchenpensionat (a private school intended to furnish young women with the social skills and cultural education needed in order to fulfill successfully a woman's traditional role in polite society) · fi neitikouIu (a private school intended to furnish young women with the social skills and cultural education needed in order to fulfill successfully a woman's traditional role in polite society) · pl pensja (a private school intended to furnish young women with the social skills and cultural education needed in order to fulfill successfully a woman's traditional role in polite society) · es escuela de modales / señoritas (a private school intended to furnish young women with the social skills and cultural education needed in order to fulfill successfully a woman's traditional role in polite society) · pl prywatna wychowawcza szkoła dla dziewczyn (a private school intended to furnish young women with the social skills and cultural education needed in order to fulfill successfully a woman's traditional role in polite society) · cmn 精修學校 /精修学校 (a private school intended to furnish young women with the social skills and cultural education needed in order to fulfill successfully a woman's traditional role in polite society)