Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The condition or period of being a widow.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The state of a man whose wife is dead, or of a woman whose husband is dead, and who has not married again: generally applied to the state or condition of being a widow.
- noun A widow's right; the estate settled on a widow.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The state of being a widow; the time during which a woman is widow; also, rarely, the state of being a widower.
- noun obsolete Estate settled on a widow.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The state or
period of being awidow orwidower
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the time of a woman's life when she is a widow
- noun the state of being a widow who has not remarried
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Her life before widowhood is her spiritual insurance policy.
Archive 2007-12-01 2007
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Her life before widowhood is her spiritual insurance policy.
Widows 2007
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Furthermore, such property that women did hold came under the control of their husbands at marriage under the principle of marital unity, although they could recover in widowhood any freehold property that had been theirs before marriage and had not been disposed of (with their consent) by their husbands.
Gutenber-e Help Page 2005
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The rent provided a source of income for the couple and a means of maintaining the wife in widowhood, with the advantage of keeping the main estate intact for the heir.
Gutenber-e Help Page 2005
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The Lord grant you that ye may find rest -- enjoy a life of tranquillity, undisturbed by the cares, incumbrances, and vexatious troubles to which a state of widowhood is peculiarly exposed.
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Women were far less frequently testators than men, and generally only in widowhood.
Gutenber-e Help Page 2005
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Get away from Pope, from all the wives whose husbands still came home, from all the friends suddenly made awkward and distant by the widow in their midst, as if her widowhood might be a catching disease.
Memory of Fire Lisle, Holly 2002
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First, for herself, the greater her husband's seniority, the greater are her chances of widowhood, which is in any case the destiny of an enormous preponderance of married women.
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She had dismissed her poor Anderling peremptorily enough; yet she would often after this look in the face of the child of her so - called widowhood, to discover what and how many traits of his father were to be seen in his lineaments.
A Group of Noble Dames Thomas Hardy 1884
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It seems the so-called widowhood effect could be caused by the combined effects of stress and age-related changes in the immune system.
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