maid
Americannoun
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maids
plural
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a female domestic employee who cleans tourist accommodations or does cleaning or other housework in a home.
a hotel maid.
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a female domestic servant with any of various duties, especially in a large house (often used in combination).
a kitchen maid who assisted the cook; a handmaid; a lady’s maid; a nursery maid.
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Archaic. a girl or young unmarried woman.
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Archaic. a female virgin.
noun
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archaic a young unmarried girl; maiden
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a female servant
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( in combination )
a housemaid
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a spinster
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of maid
First recorded in 1225–1275; Middle English maide, maid, shortened variant of maiden
Explanation
A maid is a household worker who cleans and performs various other tasks. Today, only very wealthy people have maids — it's much more common to hire an occasional housekeeper or cleaner instead. In the US, it's uncommon to find a household with an actual maid, a servant who lives in the home and tidies it up, also doing jobs like ironing, grocery shopping, and cooking. In the old days, wealthy families employed maids who wore uniforms and sometimes waited on one individual woman, helping her dress herself and cleaning up after her. Maid, short for maiden, originally meant "unmarried woman."
Vocabulary lists containing maid
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
He frequently speaks about his humble beginnings as the son of a bartender and a hotel maid.
From Barron's ● Jul. 29, 2026
They retire to Bali and rent a beach villa for $1,000 a month including utilities and maid service.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 30, 2026
And despite the tables of footballers, and her England team-mate Alessia Russo as maid of honour, Toone is "trying to keep the day away from football".
From BBC ● May 26, 2026
Ms. Millonzi’s most prominent roles are Roderigo, whose lust for Desdemona turns him into a useful tool in Iago’s hands, and Desdemona’s devoted maid and Iago’s wife, Emilia.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 3, 2026
She’d come two years ago from a small town far south of Incheon to work for their family after their first maid got married.
From "Finding Junie Kim" by Ellen Oh
“It also taught me a tremendous amount of humility. If your head ever got too big for itself, that you’re the owner’s son, and the maids didn’t show up, guess who’s making all the rooms?”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 10, 2026
That proved a winning proposition for generations of working people, yielding middle class paychecks for bartenders, restaurant servers, casino dealers and maids.
From New York Times ● Feb. 5, 2024
Almost all women in Ombada 19 and al-Thawara 29 are maids, or used to be maids, working for families in the wealthier parts of Khartoum, Omdurman and Bahri.
From BBC ● Sep. 13, 2023
Contemporary Indigenous Maya have few options but to work as construction workers, maids, and taxi drivers serving the 22 million people who arrive each year at the nearby #cancunairport.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 29, 2023
The maids will come in the morning to scrub down everything with soap, but I do my part anyway.
From "X: A Novel" by Ilyasah Shabazz
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
