catherinette

See also: Catherinette

English

Noun

catherinette (plural catherinettes)

1. Alternative form of Catherinette
   • 1980, Robert Doisneau, Photographs, page 16:

     And then again, on 25 November, Saint Catherine's Day (Saint Catherine is of course the patron saint of unmarried women), the done thing was to get hold of a catherinette, an unmarried girl of twenty-five or over, to drag her of to the rue de Cléry, to borrow a stepladder from the bistro opposite the statuse of Saint Catherine (they were quite used to lending it!), and get the girl to climb up and offer the statue a bunch of flowers you'd thoughtfully bought beforehand, giggling the while.

   • 1995, Christa Hämmerle, Plurality and individuality:

     If no marriage had been concluded by the age of twenty-five, the young woman became a "catherinette" and soon a spinster.

   • 2009, Ruth Reichl, Remembrance of Things Paris: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet, →ISBN:

     Obviously a girl can be a catherinette only once in her lifetime; it's always beautiful and a little sad, like one's first love.

   • 2017, Masha Belenky, Kathryn Kleppinger, Anne O’Neil-Henry, French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century, →ISBN, page 121:

     The card thus presents a conundrum: is she a modiste making her way in the world of work through the needle trades, or is she a catherinette, whose principal ambition is to wed?

French

Etymology

From Catherine +‎ -ette; named from St Catherine, patron saint of unmarried girls.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ka.tʁi.nɛt/

• Audio:

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Noun

catherinette f (plural catherinettes)

1. a girl of 25 years old who is unmarried by St Catherine's Day (25th November)

Further reading

• “catherinette”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.