Word of the Day:
housewife
What It Means
A woman whose main employment is homemaking, maintaining the upkeep of her home and tending to household affairs; often, such a woman whose sole [unpaid] employment is homemaking.
The wife of a householder; the mistress of a family; the female head of a household.
A little case or bag for materials used in sewing, and for other articles of female work.
Housewife in Context
“Mr Torture sells pain / To the housewives in Spain / He knows just what they crave / Mr Torture”
Did You Know?
From Middle English houswyf, housewif, huswijf, equivalent to house + wife; a doublet of hussy, which it was long distinguished from and displaced due to gradual negative connotation (see Online Etymology Dictionary entry). Cognate with West Frisian húswiif, Dutch huiswijf, German Low German Huuswief, German Hausweib.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: housewife (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “housewife.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/housewife. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
