servingmaid

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English

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Etymology

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From serving +‎ maid.

Noun

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servingmaid (plural servingmaids) (historical)

  1. A female servant.
    • 1901, Alberta Bancroft, Royal Rogues, page 61:
      It is not for the royal son of King Goldemar to make sport of peasant servingmaids;
    • 1936, Upton Sinclair, Co-op: A Novel of Living Together, page 374:
      It was what Lenin, a realistic thinker, had meant when he said that every servingmaid should be capable of running the state.
    • 1950, The I Ching; Or, Book of Changes, volume 2, page 319:
      Therefore because of her nobility she pays no attention to outer appearance, and the servingmaid, in the lowest place, is more gorgeous than she.
    • 1981, Suzette Haden Elgin, The Ozark Trilogy; republished United States: University of Arkansas Press, 2000 March, →ISBN, page 164:
      The Castle Housekeeper stood there casually watching three servingmaids polish the same banister over and over again, and she looked up as I stepped under the doorbeam and pretended to be surprised.
    • 2014, William T. Vollmann, Last Stories and Other Stories, Penguin Publishing Group, →ISBN, page 82:
      [] meanwhile one of his agents rented a stable, filled it with Arabian horses and offloaded from the Sava, and sold them all, very dear, to dukes, mercenaries and ruiners of servingmaids.
    • 2015 May 22, Emma Donoghue, Emma Donoghue: Selected Plays, Oberon Books, →ISBN:
      If you’re born a servingmaid, daughter to a servingmaid, who was daughter to a servingmaid in her turn, you know not to expect too much of life.

Synonyms

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Coordinate terms

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