puella

Noun

puella (plural puellas)

1. (rare) A young girl.
   • Carol’s family were self-sufficient in their inventive life, with Christmas a rite full of surprises and tenderness, and “dressing-up parties” spontaneous and joyously absurd. The beasts in the Milford hearth-mythology were not the obscene Night Animals who jump out of closets and eat little girls...1920, Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, page 7
   • “No; you called it that. Anyway, what’s wrong with ‘whither’?” / “Oh, that; we had to struggle through a high school commencement speech one time, something about ‘Whither now, oh, puers and puellas?’ and now the word gives us the hiccoughs.”1957, IW: The Management Magazine, volume 140, page 6