Word.ws English Dictionary

elwife

elwife 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 elwife

pluralelwives

Questions about elwife

What is elwife the alternative form of?
Elwife is the alternative form of alewife.

Words near elwife in the dictionary

  1. Elwes
  2. Elweses
  3. Elwha
  4. Elwick
  5. Elwicks
  6. elwife
  7. Elwin
  8. elwives
  9. Elwood
  10. Elwoods
  11. Elworth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: elwife (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “elwife.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/elwife. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.