Word.ws English Dictionary

hetæra

hetæra is the archaic form of hetaera.

Meaning of hetaera

Noun

hetaera (plural hetaerae or hetaeras)

  1. (historical, Ancient Greece) A highly cultivated hired female companion who would entertain upper-class male clients and might perform sex acts for them.
    • But of course our friend is only a shallow twentieth-century reproduction of the great hetairae of the past, the type to which she belongs without knowing it, Lais, Charis and the rest...1957, Lawrence Durrell, Justine
  2. A mistress.
    • Woman is dethroned as the primary and supreme sex, debased into inseminable hetaera.1971, Gottfried Benn, E. B. Ashton, Primal vision: selected writings

Forms of hetæra

pluralhetæræ

Questions about hetæra

What is hetæra the archaic form of?
Hetæra is the archaic form of hetaera.

Words near hetæra in the dictionary

  1. Hetzer
  2. Hetzers
  3. Hetzes
  4. Hetzler
  5. Hetzlers
  6. hetæra
  7. hetærism
  8. hetæræ
  9. HEU
  10. Heubeck
  11. heuchera

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hetæra (page history and authors); hetaera (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: “hetæra.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/het%C3%A6ra. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.