Word.ws English Dictionary

wivehood

wivehood is the obsolete form of wifehood.

Meaning of wifehood

Noun

wifehood (usually uncountable, plural wifehoods)

  1. (usually) The quality or state of being a wife.
    • During the week they spent at Windsor all their necessary furniture was sent in; the more ornamental articles it was decided to leave to the choice of the fair mistress, and, as she had no visits to pay or receive, the occupation it gave Louisa saved her from any mortification she might have felt...1838 (date written), L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XVI, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn, […], published 1842, →OCLC, page 199
  2. (usually) The character or behaviour that befits a good wife; wifeliness.
    • That girdle gave the vertue of chast love, / And wivehood true, to all that did it beare […].1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book IV, Canto V”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

Questions about wivehood

What is wivehood the obsolete form of?
Wivehood is the obsolete form of wifehood.

Words near wivehood in the dictionary

  1. Witzkes
  2. WIU
  3. wiv
  4. wive
  5. wived
  6. wivehood
  7. wiveless
  8. Wiveliscombe
  9. Wivelsfield
  10. Wivelsfield Green
  11. wively

Source and license

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