Word.ws English Dictionary

wife-carl

wife-carl noun: a cot-quean.

Noun

wife-carl (plural wife-carls)

  1. (obsolete) A cot-quean.
    • A niggardly curmudgeon, a wife-carl, counts the cakes as they are baking, keeps the keys of the pantry, eats out of his pocket,1865 [1863], David Lyndsay, “Ane discriptioun of Peder Coffeis”, in John Small, editor, The Monarche and Other Poems of Sir David Lyndesay, 2nd edition, volume I, London: N. Trübner & Co., page 589

Forms of wife-carl

pluralwife-carls

Questions about wife-carl

What does wife-carl mean?
Wife-carl means a cot-quean.
What part of speech is wife-carl?
Wife-carl is a noun.
What is the plural of wife-carl?
The plural of wife-carl is wife-carls.

Words near wife-carl in the dictionary

  1. wife-beaters
  2. wife-beating
  3. wife-beating question
  4. wife-beating questions
  5. wife-beatings
  6. wife-carl
  7. wife-changing
  8. wife-giver
  9. wife-givers
  10. wife-in-law
  11. wife-taker

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wife-carl (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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