Word.ws English Dictionary

ale-wife

ale-wife is the alternative form of alewife.

Meaning of alewife

Noun (1)

alewife (plural alewives)

  1. (archaic) A woman who keeps an alehouse.
    Synonyms:
    brewess

Noun (2)

alewife (plural alewives)

  1. A migrating North American fish, Alosa pseudoharengus.
    • In his System of Nature, A. D. 1776, Linnæus declares, “I hereby separate the whales from the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnæus’s express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the...1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “Cetology”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC, page 147
    Synonyms:
    branch herring, ellwhop, ellwife, gaspereau, sawbelly
  2. Any of several species similar in appearance.

Forms of ale-wife

pluralale-wives

Questions about ale-wife

What is ale-wife the alternative form of?
Ale-wife is the alternative form of alewife.

Words near ale-wife in the dictionary

  1. ale-stake
  2. ale-stakes
  3. ale-taster
  4. ale-tasters
  5. ale-washed
  6. ale-wife
  7. ale-wives
  8. Alea
  9. Aleah
  10. aleak
  11. aleation

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ale-wife (page history and authors); alewife (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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