directress
Americannoun
Gender
See -ess.
Etymology
Origin of directress
First recorded in 1570–80; direct(o)r + -ess
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.
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.”
From Los Angeles Times
“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.
From Los Angeles Times
That morning Liyana had urged Sylvie to defy the “directress” who ordered her to remove a tortoise-shell clip from her hair.
From Literature
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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.”
From Literature
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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.”
From Washington Times
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.