medicine woman
medicine woman noun: a female Native American (or, any other indigenous) shamanistic healer.
Noun
medicine woman (plural medicine women)
- A female Native American (or, any other indigenous) shamanistic healer.
- Near-synonym: shaman
- Some twenty hours later his son was born, two months early, in the tepee of a skilled medicine woman.1950, Dorothy M. Johnson, A Man Called Horse; in Indian Country, London: Corgi, 1961, page 185
- Synonyms:
- shaman
Synonyms of medicine woman
Forms of medicine woman
| plural | medicine women |
|---|
Origin of medicine woman
Probably a calque of Ojibwe mashkikiiwininiikwe (“female doctor”), from mashkiki (“medicine”) + inini (“man”) + ikwe (“woman”).
Questions about medicine woman
- What does medicine woman mean?
- Medicine woman means a female Native American (or, any other indigenous) shamanistic healer.
- What part of speech is medicine woman?
- Medicine woman is a noun.
- What is the plural of medicine woman?
- The plural of medicine woman is medicine women.
Words near medicine woman in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: medicine woman (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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