Word.ws English Dictionary

woman of letters

woman of letters is the female equivalent of man of letters.

Meaning of man of letters

Noun

man of letters (plural men of letters)

  1. (dated) A literary man; a scholar or author.
    • This may be accounted for largely on the ground that Cicero and Petrarch were men of the same temperament and cast of mind. They were both typical men of letters. The man of letters is intellectually alert; sensitive to impressions and able to report them; hospitable to all ideas of his time; […]1898, James Harvey Robinson, Henry Winchester Rolfe, Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, published 1909, page 229

Forms of woman of letters

pluralwomen of letters

Questions about woman of letters

What is woman of letters the female equivalent of?
Woman of letters is the female equivalent of man of letters.

Words near woman of letters in the dictionary

  1. woman king
  2. woman of easy virtue
  3. woman of few words
  4. woman of ill fame
  5. woman of ill repute
  6. woman of letters
  7. woman of means
  8. woman of the cloth
  9. woman of the hour
  10. woman of the house
  11. woman of the night

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: woman of letters (page history and authors); man of letters (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: “woman of letters.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/woman_of_letters. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.