Word.ws English Dictionary

bridesmaiden

bridesmaiden noun: an unmarried bridesmaid.

Noun

bridesmaiden (plural bridesmaidens)

  1. An unmarried bridesmaid.
    • […]; and so warmly did he share the partiality of Lady Mary and Lady Jemima for the gentle recluse, whom he persisted in calling “la belle au bois dormant,” that, when informed that though the funeral baked meats of the late Earl were not to furnish forth the marriage-table of his successor, the...1855, Catherine Grace F. Gore, Mammon; or, The hardships of an heiress, volume 2, Hurst and Blackett, page 45
    • And when a little bridesmaiden, uncommonly like you, / Comes into church so trippingly, all dress’d in white and blue, / You’ll discover, as you reach the middle aisle, / Why they linger’d, linger’d, linger’d at the stile.1875, Belgravia, volume 27, page 501

Examples of bridesmaiden in a sentence

  • “I shall have to appear as chief bridesmaiden, whilst I am a married woman.”1880, Agnes Smith Lewis, The Brides of Ardmore: A Story of Irish Life, page 258:
  • The Night wore all her starry gems of pride, / To be bridesmaiden to that peerless bride;1885, Edwin Arnold, The Secret of Death: From the Sanskrit with Some Collected Poems, page 58:
  • That night, therefore, I told my cousin of my plans, and she greatly astonished and dismayed me by saying that she, too, would go with me and be bridesmaiden.1896, The Primitive Methodist Magazine, volume 77, page 329:
  • And now, after all, here I had been married with ne’er a bridesmaiden at all!1896, The Strand Magazine, volume 11, page 44:

Forms of bridesmaiden

pluralbridesmaidens

Origin of bridesmaiden

From bride + -s- + maiden.

Questions about bridesmaiden

What does bridesmaiden mean?
Bridesmaiden means an unmarried bridesmaid.
How do you use bridesmaiden in a sentence?
“I shall have to appear as chief bridesmaiden, whilst I am a married woman.”
What part of speech is bridesmaiden?
Bridesmaiden is a noun.
What is the plural of bridesmaiden?
The plural of bridesmaiden is bridesmaidens.

Words near bridesmaiden in the dictionary

  1. Brideshead
  2. Bridesheadian
  3. brideship
  4. bridesmaid
  5. bridesmaided
  6. bridesmaiden
  7. bridesmaidens
  8. bridesmaiding
  9. bridesmaids
  10. bridesmaidship
  11. bridesman

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bridesmaiden (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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