Word.ws English Dictionary

maister

maister is the obsolete form of master.

Meaning of master

Noun

master (plural masters)

  1. Someone who has control over something or someone.
    • We are masters of the sea.1881, Benjamin Jowett, Thucydides
  2. The owner of an animal or slave.
  3. The captain of a merchant ship; a master mariner.
    • Master at two-and-twenty, and married at twenty-three—1896, Rudyard Kipling, The Mary Gloster
    Synonyms:
    skipper, captain
  4. (dated) A male head of household.
  5. Someone who employs others.
    • No matter how early I came down, I would find him on the veranda, smoking cigarettes, or otherwise his man would be there with a message to say that his master would shortly join me if I would kindly wait.1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter IV, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC, page 46
  6. An expert at something.
    • Mark Twain was a master of fiction.

See all 42 meanings of master

Verb

maister (third-person singular simple present maisters, present participle maistering, simple past and past participle maistered)

  1. (dialectal) To master; to gain control over.
    • D'ye think I am to be John Tamson's man, and maistered by women a' the days o' my life ?1851, Sir Walter Scott, The Tale of Old Mortality
    • Thus Reason said: but she came, Reason vanished; Her eyes so maistering me, that such objection Seem'd but to spoile the foode of thoughts long famishēd;1873, Philip Sidney, Alexander Balloch Grosart, The Complete Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, page 9

Forms of maister

Noun
pluralmaisters
Verb
third-person singular presentmaisters
present participlemaistering
past participlemaistered
pastmaistered

Words formed from maister

Questions about maister

What does maister mean?
Maister means to master; to gain control over.
What is maister the obsolete form of?
Maister is the obsolete form of master.
What part of speech is maister?
Maister is a verb.
What is the past tense of maister?
The past tense of maister is maistered.

Words near maister in the dictionary

  1. Maisonneuve's instruments
  2. maisons de passe
  3. maisons de tolérance
  4. Maisons-Alfort
  5. maist
  6. maister
  7. maistered
  8. maistering
  9. maisters
  10. maistery
  11. maistre

Source and license

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