Word.ws English Dictionary

hetaerae

hetaerae is the plural 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

Questions about hetaerae

What is hetaerae the plural of?
Hetaerae is the plural of hetaera.

Words near hetaerae in the dictionary

  1. het up
  2. het-
  3. heta
  4. hetacillin
  5. hetaera
  6. hetaerae
  7. hetaeras
  8. hetaeric
  9. hetaerism
  10. hetaerist
  11. hetaerists

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hetaerae (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: “hetaerae.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hetaerae. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.