Word.ws English Dictionary

wood-wife

wood-wife noun: a type of female wood spirit.

Noun

wood-wife (plural wood-wives)

  1. (Germanic) A type of female wood spirit.
    • Like the Wild Huntsman, the devil on Ash Wesdnesday hunts the wood-wives.1851, Benjamin Thorpe, Northern Mythology, volume I, London: Edward Lumley, page 235
    • The Vicentina Germans worship a wood-wife, chiefly between Christmas and Twelfthday: the women spin flax from the distaff, and throw it in the fire to propitiate her.1882, Jacob Grimm, translated by James Steven Stallybrass, Teutonic Mythology, volume III, London: George Bell and Sons, page 432

Forms of wood-wife

pluralwood-wives

Questions about wood-wife

What does wood-wife mean?
Wood-wife means a type of female wood spirit.
What part of speech is wood-wife?
Wood-wife is a noun.
What is the plural of wood-wife?
The plural of wood-wife is wood-wives.

Words near wood-wife in the dictionary

  1. wood-stoves
  2. wood-thistle
  3. wood-thistles
  4. wood-wide web
  5. wood-wide webs
  6. wood-wife
  7. wood-wives
  8. wood-wool
  9. wood-wroth
  10. Woodacre
  11. Woodale

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wood-wife (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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