catherinette
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 0.00 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
2
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Alternative form of Catherinette.
noun
An unmarried woman over the age of 25 who lives in a country that celebrates the festival of Saint Catherine's Day for such women.
Example Sentences
- "And then again, on 25 November, Saint Catherine's Day (Saint Catherine is of course the patron saint of unmarried women), the done thing was to get hold of a catherinette, an unmarried girl of twenty-five or over, to drag her of to the rue de Cléry, to borrow a stepladder from the bistro opposite the statuse of Saint Catherine (they were quite used to lending it!), and get the girl to climb up and offer the statue a bunch of flowers you'd thoughtfully bought beforehand, giggling the while."
- "If no marriage had been concluded by the age of twenty-five, the young woman became a "catherinette" and soon a spinster."
- "Obviously a girl can be a catherinette only once in her lifetime; it's always beautiful and a little sad, like one's first love."
- "The card thus presents a conundrum: is she a modiste making her way in the world of work through the needle trades, or is she a catherinette, whose principal ambition is to wed?"
- "Every Catherinette has received, by the first post, a Valentine card, with midget mob-cap and the pretty, doleful ribbons stuck on."
- "Each shop elects a Catherinette, a model or designer or simple seamstress, unmarried and twenty-five years of age. I was the Catherinette of a shop where I worked."
Etymology
From the French.