Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A priestess or female votary of Bacchus.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In antiquity, a priestess of Bacchus, or a woman who joined in the celebration of the festivals of Bacchus; a woman inspired with the bacchic frenzy. See mænad.
  • noun A woman addicted to intemperance or riotous revelry; a female bacchanal.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A priestess of Bacchus.
  • noun A female bacchanal.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A priestess of Bacchus.
  • noun A female bacchanal.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun (classical mythology) a priestess or votary of Bacchus

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French, from Latin bacchāns, bacchant-; see bacchant.]

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Examples

  • The women—bare shouldered, their hair à la bacchante, with long curls at the back entwined with vine leaves and bunches of grapes—waltzed around the staid little queen.

    THE DIAMOND JULIE BAUMGOLD 2005

  • The women—bare shouldered, their hair à la bacchante, with long curls at the back entwined with vine leaves and bunches of grapes—waltzed around the staid little queen.

    THE DIAMOND JULIE BAUMGOLD 2005

  • The women—bare shouldered, their hair à la bacchante, with long curls at the back entwined with vine leaves and bunches of grapes—waltzed around the staid little queen.

    THE DIAMOND JULIE BAUMGOLD 2005

  • Wherever she came there was laughter among the ladies, of the high hysteric bacchante kind, not true mirth, but

    The Heavenly Twins Madame Sarah Grand

  • Bacchus being carried by a satyr brandishing a thyrsus, and a torch-bearing bacchante.

    Museum of Antiquity A Description of Ancient Life

  • Hung with flowers, she looked like a bacchante, with one beautiful arm and shoulder showing bare through her mantle of tumbled hair.

    Leonie of the Jungle Joan Conquest

  • Daring beauty, wild, lovely bacchante, with black, beaming eyes, tempt us not with that bright flame to destruction!

    The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 Devoted to Literature and National Policy Various

  • Molly driving a car in Jamaica will be like Pavlova doing a bacchante on the point of a needle!

    The Bent Twig Dorothy Canfield Fisher 1918

  • “In very truth, ” thought Grainier, “it is a salamander—a nymph—’tis a goddess—a bacchante of Mount Mæ nalus!

    III. Besos Para Golpes. Book II 1917

  • I perceived her, under the heavy procession of his words, a figure of astounding romance, an adventuress incomparable, a Polynesian bacchante.

    The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Various 1915

Comments

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  • "Marc Bolan, who is the idol of British teenyboppers, wears iridescent eyelids, lame' trousers, feather boas and spangles on his cheeks, but he always reminds the mouse-coloured reporters who interview him that he is a very tough cookie and very well-endowed. His exhibitionism is both erotic and male; it is only just becoming possible after a hundred and fifty years of repression. The way the little girls scream out for him might remind us of the jubilant bacchantes of antiquity who sang out of their lover:

    'Flames float out from his trailing wand

    As he runs, as he dances,

    Kindling the stragglers,

    Spurring with cries,

    and his long curls stream to the wind!'"

    - 'What turns women on', Germaine Greer in Esquire, 1973.

    April 14, 2008

  • Usage on soutane.

    March 14, 2009