Skip to content
ontologydriven
Sign out

Dictionary

Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

frau en · NOUN

Pronunciation

  • /fɹaʊ/

Etymology

Borrowed from German Frau. Doublet of frow, vrou, and vrouw.

Meanings

  1. A woman, especially a German woman.
    • To Germantown, Pa., the German frauen carried their domestic industry of the hand knitting of woolen hose, and before 1775 there were one hundred and fifty knitting frames at Germantown and in the vicinity of the Brandywine; […] 1911, John Howard Brown, E[dith] M[ary] Norris, editors, Lamb’s Textile Industries of the United States: Embracing Biographical Sketches of Prominment Men and a Historical Resumé of the Progress of Textile Manufacture from the Earliest Records to the Present Time, volume I, Boston, Mass.: James H. Lamb Company, page 149:
    • Witch: / Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! / You damned old beast! You cursed old sow! / You leave the kettle and singe the frau. 1961, Goethe, translated by Walter Kaufman, Faust, line 2465:
    • It presents Dürer’s mother as a sharp-nosed, world-weary German frau looking wryly out at life from under a decorous wimple. 2007 January 12, Grace Glueck, “Fun With Studio Crafts: When the Traditional Gets Quirky”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 25 Aug 2019:

Forms

SpellingFeaturesLabelsSource
fraus Number=Plur lexicographic

Deriveds

house frau

Translations (1)

ru фра́у (a woman, especially a German woman)