maid
Americannoun
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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:
Their dad and his partner, Sarah, were planning a wedding, and Caitlin was due to be Sarah's maid of honour.
From BBC ● Jul. 1, 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
Tanaka herself delightfully portrays the slightly dim family maid the “kids” enlist for their scheme.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 4, 2026
I thought about the days when Great-great-aunt Florentine played old maid with me and Tidings.
From Each Little Bird That Sings by Deborah Wiles
Aaron Seyedian owns a cleaning business that starts its maids at $27 an hour in New York City.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 13, 2026
Dunk and Egg’s camaraderie fits the same tradition, proposing scullery maids can become queens.
From Salon ● Feb. 23, 2026
The trend, Weil wrote, encompasses hotel maids, cable installers, commercial janitors and merchandise pickers in Amazon warehouses — all are actually on the payroll of third-party employment firms.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 13, 2024
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
“We could take any of the maids, or cook.”
From "The Once and Future King" by T. H. White
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.
