noun
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a shameless or promiscuous woman
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dialect a folder for needles, thread, etc
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of hussy
1520–30; earlier hussive housewife
Explanation
A hussy is a woman or girl who's disrespectful or immoral. Your old fashioned grandmother might call your brother's live-in girlfriend a hussy. The noun hussy is an insulting and somewhat antique way to refer to a woman whose actions don't line up with traditional ideas of being respectable. A sexually bold women is most likely to be called a hussy, especially if she's seen as "stealing" another woman's partner. Originally, hussy was a shortening of the Middle English husewif, "housewife." Through the 1500's, hussy came to mean "any woman or girl," and by the 1650's it meant "an improper woman or girl."
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:
“Hey, miss Honey Bey. It’s Dolly P. You know that hussy with the good hair you sang about?” she says on the track.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 29, 2024
In the interlude "Dolly P," Parton references "Jolene" with, "You know that hussy with the good hair you sing about?/ Reminded me of someone I knew back when."
From Salon ● Mar. 29, 2024
At 50 minutes, I was certain that a heart attack was imminent, but death was preferable to losing to that hussy.
From The Guardian ● Jul. 1, 2017
But when the Great Lover married his hussy and began uxoriously washing diapers and doing kitchen chores to please her, his prestige began to wane.
From Time Magazine Archive
“Use your power,” she said, “and make the hussy fall madly in love with the vilest and most despicable creature there is in the whole world.”
From "Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes" by Edith Hamilton
Rowlandson looked around and saw that hussies and thieves were thriving not just on the streets but in elegant salons and prosperous businesses as well.
From New York Times ● May 15, 2011
What with roystering fellows and smooth-tongued gallants, and with silly, empty-headed hussies like that Giulietta, one has much ado to keep the best of them straight.
From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 47, September, 1861 by Various
She was allowed twenty minutes to go from the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or to the Rue du Caire, and it was enough, for these young hussies have the legs of racehorses.
From L'Assommoir by Émile Zola
And when she found herself alone, and went back towards the Rue Pirouette, she reflected that those three cackling hussies were not worth a rope to hang them.
From The Fat and the Thin by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
One hears of "artful hussies" and "artful dodgers."
From William of Germany by Stanley Shaw
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.
