directress

[dih-rek-tris, dahy-]

noun

1. a woman who is a director.

Gender Note

See -ess.

Word History and Origins

Origin of directress¹

First recorded in 1570–80; direct(o)r + -ess

Example Sentences

At the Swiss school she “taught all the other girls about menstruation,” she told the New York Daily News in 1983, “and I got into trouble with the directress. She told me to shut up.”

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“Annie” has three crackerjack performances: Aileen Quinn’s meltingly lovable Annie; Albert Finney’s Daddy Warbucks, which has dimensions you might not have believed possible given the comic strip original, and Burnett’s Miss Hannigan, directress of the orphanage, who takes to gin as a sensible antidote to a single life bounded on all sides by little girls.

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On the twenty-ninth day, she forgot to remove it in the morning and the “directress” snapped at her as the girls stood in line for their “daily checkup.”

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That morning Liyana had urged Sylvie to defy the “directress” who ordered her to remove a tortoise-shell clip from her hair.

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“She is head directress of the New York Orphan Asylum. … Previous to the establishment of this benevolent institution, there was no public receptacle for the numerous unfortunate infants, which are so frequently left by their depraved parents, to perish in the streets of the great metropolis.”

Read more on Washington Times