servingmaid en · NOUN
Etymology
From serving + maid.
Meanings
-
(historical) A female servant.
[…] meanwhile one of his agents rented a stable, filled it with Arabian horses and offloaded from the Sava, and sold them all, very dear, to dukes, mercenaries and ruiners of servingmaids.
2014, William T. Vollmann, Last Stories and Other Stories, Penguin Publishing Group, →ISBN, page 82:If you’re born a servingmaid, daughter to a servingmaid, who was daughter to a servingmaid in her turn, you know not to expect too much of life.
2015 May 22, Emma Donoghue, Emma Donoghue: Selected Plays, Oberon Books, →ISBN:It was what Lenin, a realistic thinker, had meant when he said that every servingmaid should be capable of running the state.
1936, Upton Sinclair, Co-op: A Novel of Living Together, page 374:It is not for the royal son of King Goldemar to make sport of peasant servingmaids;
1901, Alberta Bancroft, Royal Rogues, page 61:Therefore because of her nobility she pays no attention to outer appearance, and the servingmaid, in the lowest place, is more gorgeous than she.
1950, The I Ching; Or, Book of Changes, volume 2, page 319:The Castle Housekeeper stood there casually watching three servingmaids polish the same banister over and over again, and she looked up as I stepped under the doorbeam and pretended to be surprised.
1981, Suzette Haden Elgin, The Ozark Trilogy; republished United States: University of Arkansas Press, March 2000, →ISBN, page 164:
Forms
| Spelling | Features | Labels | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| servingmaids | Number=Plur | lexicographic |