Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A woman who is divorced or separated from her husband.
- noun A woman whose husband is temporarily absent.
- noun An abandoned mistress.
- noun The mother of a child born out of wedlock.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun An unmarried woman who has had a child.
- noun A wife temporarily separated from her husband, as while he is traveling or residing at a distance on account of business: also often applied to a divorced woman, or to a wife who has been abandoned by her husband.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a divorced woman or a woman who is separated from her husband
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[Perhaps in allusion to a bed of grass or hay.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
From grass + widow. Compare Dutch grasweduwe, Swedish gräsänka.
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Examples
Sorry, no example sentences found.
sionnach commented on the word grass widow
Generally taken to mean a woman who is temporarily separated from her husband (e.g. because of a work or military assignment). Thus, allegedly, a widow by grace or favour, not by necessity (as in the cause of death).
Several etymologies appear to be out there, none of them altogether convincing.
October 27, 2007
slumry commented on the word grass widow
Anatoly Liberman argues persuasively that "grace widow" should be dismissed as folk etymology. He has a interesting discussion of the history of the term grass widow at http://blog.oup.com/2009/02/grasswidows/
June 2, 2015