(n.) A woman who spins, or whose occupation is to spin.
(n.) A man who spins.
(n.) An unmarried or single woman; -- used in legal proceedings as a title, or addition to the surname.
(n.) A woman of evil life and character; -- so called from being forced to spin in a house of correction.
Example Sentences:
(1) At one point, Walters speculates that “she looks the same weight as the Duchess – about 8st”; later, he disingenuously asks her to discuss “the cruel comments about being a ‘childless spinster’”, neither telling readers who made those “cruel comments” in the first place, or where.
(2) Lise is a lonely and strange spinster who will soon be murdered.
(3) • Petra's spinster landladies added caraway seeds to their mix.
(4) Your little country will forever be honoured as the site that made the Princess Diana thing look like a restrained wake for a loathed spinster who perished alone on a desert island.
(5) And, of course, in 1961 she published The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her legendary tale of the Edinburgh spinster schoolteacher who devotes her middle years to her "gerrils", to Mussolini and to having illicit sex.
(6) "In the same way as the first Bridget book was looking at the way a 30-something single woman was branded as a tragic spinster, and then we got the new idea of a singleton, [the new book] will be looking at later phases in life when you get branded as a certain thing," she said, "and you don't have to be that at all and it's all outdated and ridiculous.
(7) Today the unruly hair, bushy eyebrows and spinster image that for so long attracted cruel teasing, especially from young children, are set to be the passport to her undoubted future success.
(8) A 69-year-old spinster presented with a history of generalised bone pains in September 1977.
(9) The Brontës are shown, with understated relish, as lonely, half-mad spinsters, surrounded by insufferable yokels and the unmentionable stench of death.
(10) St Paul's Girls' School, where I enjoyed the lessons of the English teacher Miss Jenkinson but little else, was a grim institution in the early 1950s - more Brontë than Austen - and the little piece of ivory on which the celebrated spinster wrote her tales of love and disappointment and sudden, unconvincing happiness, didn't mean anything to me.
(11) She stares at a fire, sitting spinster straight, stiff with grief.
(12) She had digs in Upper Leeson Street with two spinster sisters whose culinary repertoire was somewhat limited.
(13) As she neared 50, and stayed resolute about acting her age, Hepburn was the schoolteacher plunged into late love in Venice, in David Lean's Summer Madness (1955), a spinster refreshed by Burt Lancaster in The Rainmaker (1956), and a very creepy monster mother in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959).
(14) She might have stitched the whole thing in front of her hissing gas fire, with her brass ornaments twinkling in the background, Corrie playing on the telly and The Hay Wain over the fireplace.” Perry flirts with John Major territory – “cricket on the village green” makes an appearance among Perry’s aggregation of words and phrases that seem to him to express Britishness – but it is too sly to fall for the whole warm beer and cycling spinsters schtick.
(15) He also shows how cartoons formed the backbone of the anti-suffrage movement, caricaturing suffragettes as monstrous spinsters.
(16) Singledom in women is usually presented as a failure to achieve the ideal of wife and mother: single women are haunted by nasty words such as "spinster" and must contend with caricatures of lonely women who are lost without a man to define them .
(17) It seemed the only way I could face Christmas without my own family and not feel like the tragic spinster aunt for whom everyone feels a bit sorry (I cannot bear pity, and Christmas has brought out the dreaded head tilt in even the most well-intentioned loved ones).
(18) In 1811 Mary Reynolds, a somber Pennsylvania spinster, awoke from a prolonged sleep as a new personality.
(19) Jane Austen scholar Dr Paula Byrne claims to have discovered a lost portrait of the author which, far from depicting a grumpy spinster, shows a writer at the height of her powers and a woman comfortable in her own skin.
(20) So, what better high note to end an extraordinary week, one that has seen the 47-year-old Scottish singing spinster win plaudits from around the world, than the prospect of a duet with her heroine, Elaine Paige?
Widow
Definition:
(n.) A woman who has lost her husband by death, and has not married again; one living bereaved of a husband.
(a.) Widowed.
(v. t.) To reduce to the condition of a widow; to bereave of a husband; -- rarely used except in the past participle.
(v. t.) To deprive of one who is loved; to strip of anything beloved or highly esteemed; to make desolate or bare; to bereave.
(v. t.) To endow with a widow's right.
(v. t.) To become, or survive as, the widow of.
Example Sentences:
(1) 62.1% were from disrupted families (39.5% divorced, 12.9% remarried, and 9.7% widowed).
(2) I thought she had been put out of her misery by marriage but now she is a widow.
(3) In the court of appeal, an agreement was arrived at between the widow of the deceased and the third-party insurance of the person responsible for the accident.
(4) Those with lower knowledge of AIDS were more likely to be separated, divorced or widowed, older, and more personally concerned about AIDS.
(5) Randall, a former banking computer analyst and a widower with two grownup daughters, learned on Wednesday that charges of "trafficking obscene material" had been dropped and he was to be deported.
(6) In his article, Adams also hits out at the controversial history archive in which ex-IRA members name Adams as the commander who gave the order for the widow to be killed and buried at a secret location.
(7) How delightful that the anti-marriage group is known as Blag and opposed by Glad – which has more background : [The] ruling comes with respect to claims brought by six married same-sex couples and one widower from the states of Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont who were denied federal tax, social security, pension and family medical leave protections only because they are (or were) married to someone of the same sex.
(8) A 4-year-old girl was admitted 30 hours after being bitten by a black widow spider.
(9) The qualities of daughter versus same-sex friend relationships were described by 151 married and widowed elderly women.
(10) While companies such as Fidelity, Scottish Widows, Standard Life and Aviva will open for business, Royal London, Zurich, Axa and the Pru will not take calls until Tuesday.
(11) The mortality from tumours of the gastrointestinal tract in the Canadian population in 1970-72 was 16% higher in single than in married men (on the basis of age-adjusted rates), 25% higher in widowed men and 28% higher in divorced men.
(12) This is a right that EU citizens have been campaigning to protect as it accommodates the future care of widowed parents.
(13) Today we are starting a new series called ‘Facing my fear’, launching with an essay from a young widow who had to return to the city where she first met her late husband .
(14) Lloyds Banking Group, which includes the pension provider Scottish Widows, said it had received between 300 and 400 calls before 3pm.
(15) War widows and those on disability living allowance will be exempt from the cap.
(16) 'It seems that God punished him already,' said Hajra Catic, of the association representing the mothers and widows of 8,000 Muslim men and boys massacred by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica.
(17) Ben Emmerson QC, the lawyer acting for Litvinenko's widow, Marina, said Hague and David Cameron were "dancing to the Russian tarantella" and seeking to "cover up" evidence that the Russian state was behind Litvinenko's polonium poisoning in 2006.
(18) The long piece of cloth bearing the image of a man's face and body which is kept in Turin dates from at least 1357 when it was first displayed by the widow of a French knight.
(19) Demented patients were more liable to be placed in an institution, as were unmarried or widowed persons and people unable to prepare their own meals.
(20) Univariate comparisons showed that in both sexes undesirable life events and social problems were associated with emotional distress; in men the presence of physical symptoms and widowed, separated or divorced status also showed such an association.