| / English Dictionary |
WIDOW
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A woman whose husband is dead especially one who has not remarried
Synonyms:
widow; widow woman
Classified under:
Hypernyms ("widow" is a kind of...):
adult female; woman (an adult female person (as opposed to a man))
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "widow"):
dowager (a widow holding property received from her deceased husband)
war widow (a woman whose husband has died in war)
Derivation:
widow (cause to be without a spouse)
widowhood (the state of being a widow who has not remarried)
widowhood (the time of a woman's life when she is a widow)
II. (verb)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Cause to be without a spouse
Example:
The war widowed many women in the former Yugoslavia
Classified under:
Verbs of size, temperature change, intensifying, etc.
Hypernyms (to "widow" is one way to...):
leave; leave behind (be survived by after one's death)
Sentence frame:
Somebody ----s somebody
Derivation:
widow (a woman whose husband is dead especially one who has not remarried)
Context examples:
It touches the question of dimidiation or impalement in the coat of mine uncle, Sir John Leighton of Shropshire, who took unto wife the widow of Sir Henry Oglander of Nunwell.
(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
When Dr. Roylott was in India he married my mother, Mrs. Stoner, the young widow of Major-General Stoner, of the Bengal Artillery.
(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Me! a poor, helpless, forlorn widow, unfit for anything, my spirits quite broke down; what could I do with a girl at her time of life?
(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)
And no widow nor weak one shall cry in the night because there is no meat, when the strong men are groaning in great pain for that they have eaten overmuch.
(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)
You’re too late. She’s my wife. No, she’s your widow. His revolver cracked, and I saw the blood spurt from the front of Woodley’s waistcoat.
(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
I bemoaned my desolate widow and fatherless children.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
Mrs. Thorpe was a widow, and not a very rich one; she was a good-humoured, well-meaning woman, and a very indulgent mother.
(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)
—maid, wife, or widow?
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
Mrs. March is as brisk and cheery, though rather grayer, than when we saw her last, and just now so absorbed in Meg's affairs that the hospitals and homes still full of wounded 'boys' and soldiers' widows, decidedly miss the motherly missionary's visits.
(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)
He paid two dollars and a half a month rent for the small room he got from his Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and a widow, hard working and harsher tempered, rearing her large brood of children somehow, and drowning her sorrow and fatigue at irregular intervals in a gallon of the thin, sour wine that she bought from the corner grocery and saloon for fifteen cents.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
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