Word.ws English Dictionary

materfamilias

materfamilias noun: the female head of a household.

Noun

materfamilias (plural materfamiliases or matresfamilias)

  1. The female head of a household.
    • The materfamilias and her daughters do a good deal of the housework, and even open the front door on occasion.1903, Luigi Villari, Italian Life in Town and Country, pages 110–111
    • That my old-country materfamilias is actually Chinese--Mandarin Chinese, yet--is a negligible discrepancy.1990 June 1, Mary Shen Barnidge, “Who Killed the Dragon Lady”, in Chicago Reader
    Synonyms:
    matriarch

Synonyms of materfamilias

Forms of materfamilias

pluralmaterfamiliases
pluralmatresfamilias

Origin of materfamilias

From Latin māter familiās (“mother of the household”).

Questions about materfamilias

What does materfamilias mean?
Materfamilias means the female head of a household.
What part of speech is materfamilias?
Materfamilias is a noun.
What is the plural of materfamilias?
The plural of materfamilias is materfamiliases.

Words near materfamilias in the dictionary

  1. mater lectionis
  2. mater sammich
  3. mater sammiches
  4. Matera
  5. Materan
  6. materfamilias
  7. materfamiliases
  8. materia
  9. materia medica
  10. materia prima
  11. materia subtilis

Source and license

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