Word.ws English Dictionary

ancress

ancress is the obsolete form of anchoress.

Meaning of anchoress

Noun (1)

anchoress (plural anchoresses)

  1. A female anchorite. A woman who chooses to withdraw from the world to live a solitary life of prayer and contemplation.
    • … and advises the anchoresses to take on the basic religious vows …2003, Yōko Wada, “A Genre of Ancrene Wisse”, in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, DS Brewer, →ISBN, page 39
    Synonyms:
    anchoritess

Noun (2)

anchoress (plural anchoresses)

  1. (informal) An anchorwoman.
    • Williams was co-hosting in place of Katie Couric, a move some have speculated was meant to deprive the possible next anchoress of the CBS Evening News the prime time exposure.2006 February 11, James Poniewozik, “Live from Turin—Sorry, Torino—It's NBC”, in Time, archived from the original on 12 Aug 2014

Forms of ancress

pluralancresses

Questions about ancress

What is ancress the obsolete form of?
Ancress is the obsolete form of anchoress.

Words near ancress in the dictionary

  1. ANCOVAs
  2. ancovenin
  3. Ancram
  4. ancraophobia
  5. ancred
  6. ancress
  7. ancresses
  8. ancrod
  9. Ancroft
  10. Ancrum
  11. Ancrums

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ancress (page history and authors); anchoress (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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Cite this entry: “ancress.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ancress. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.