Word.ws English Dictionary

damoiselle

damoiselle is the obsolete spelling of damsel.

Meaning of damsel

Noun

damsel (plural damsels)

  1. A young woman (of noble birth).
  2. A girl; a maiden (without sexual experience).
  3. A young woman who is not married.
  4. An unmarried lady-in-waiting.
  5. A young, attractive woman.
    • And here I might (if I followed the example of most travellers) launch out into a glowing description of the charms of these damsels, the elegant costumes they wore, and the gold and silver ornaments with which they were adorned. The jacket or body of purple gauze would figure well in such a...1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume I, London: Macmillan and Co., page 343
  6. A chattering damsel (component of a mill).
    • The spout that conveys the grain from the hopper to the eye or centre of the upper millstone rests against the spindle, just at the damsel, and thus receives an alternate back and forward motion, […]1843, The Magazine of Science, and Schools of Art, volume 4, page 263

Forms of damoiselle

pluraldamoiselles

Questions about damoiselle

What is damoiselle the obsolete spelling of?
Damoiselle is the obsolete spelling of damsel.

Words near damoiselle in the dictionary

  1. Damoh
  2. damoiseau
  3. damoiseaus
  4. damoiseaux
  5. damoisel
  6. damoiselle
  7. damoiselles
  8. damoisels
  9. Damon
  10. Damona
  11. Damone

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: damoiselle (page history and authors); damsel (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: “damoiselle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/damoiselle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.