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• dame-school
  dame-school

  noun

  a school in which the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic were taught to neighborhood children by a woman in her own home.
• dame school
  dame school

  noun

  (formerly) a small school, often in a village, usually run by an elderly woman in her own home to teach young children to read and write

dame-school

American  

[deym-skool] / ˈdeɪmˌskul /

noun

1. a school in which the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic were taught to neighborhood children by a woman in her own home.

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dame school British  

noun

1. (formerly) a small school, often in a village, usually run by an elderly woman in her own home to teach young children to read and write

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Etymology

Origin of dame-school

First recorded in 1810–20

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

dame-school dame school

Here is his account of his first attendance at the central town-school of Dorchester, after he had left a dame-school.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 by Various

The gods do not keep a dame-school for us here on earth, and their ways are less obvious than that.

From Pirate Gold by Stimson, Frederic Jesup

In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave because he was too clever to be tolerable.

From Robert Browning by Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)

She went, with other boys and girls, to a small dame-school on the other side of Bowdoin Square; for Jamie would not hear of a public school.

From Pirate Gold by Stimson, Frederic Jesup

This is an affectionate half-humorous description of the little dame-school of Shenstone's—and of everybody's—native village, and has the true idyllic touch.

From A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century by Beers, Henry A. (Henry Augustin)

But some of today's most brilliant and brilliantined names in music went to a dame school to get their shine.

From Time Magazine Archive

She only knew that the past ten days since the dame school had begun had been the pleasantest she had known in Connecticut.

From "The Witch of Blackbird Pond" by Elizabeth George Speare

The more she thought about it, the more pleasant the dame school sounded to Kit.

From "The Witch of Blackbird Pond" by Elizabeth George Speare

Two small heads bent earnestly over each of the three dog-eared primers which were all the dame school could boast.

From "The Witch of Blackbird Pond" by Elizabeth George Speare

He was first sent to a "dame school," and then to the private school of William Wells, under whose rigid tuition he became thoroughly grounded in the classics.

From The Vision of Sir Launfal And Other Poems by James Russell Lowell; Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Julian W. Abernethy, PH.D. by Lowell, James Russell