finishing school
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.28 in modern English
27
Scrabble Score
15
Letters
3
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A private school intended to furnish young women with the social skills and cultural education needed in order to fulfill successfully a woman's traditional role in polite society.
Dated
Example Sentences
- ""All she needs is a year or two at a fashionable finishing school, so that at eighteen she can come out with éclat," put in Aunt Clara."
- "Until the 1920s, most European high schools for girls were finishing schools."
- "On the advice of a well-heeled friend from Indonesia, she then decamped to Switzerland to attend the Institut Villa Pierrefeu. “They call it ‘the finishing school that refuses to be finished,’” Ms. Ho explained, the last in a dying form of pedagogy that asks wealthy women to scrutinize the folds in napkins with an intensity akin to Watson and Crick studying the double helix."