washerwoman
Americannoun
-
washerwomen
plural
noun
Gender
See -woman.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of washerwoman
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:
June Brown, who has died at the age of 95, won her place in British hearts playing the chain-smoking washerwoman, Dot Cotton in EastEnders.
From BBC ● Apr. 4, 2022
McCarty worked for 75 years as a washerwoman and donated the majority of her life savings to the university after her death in 1999 at the age of 91.
From Washington Times ● Oct. 9, 2020
Rigid social and ethnic demarcations begin to bend when the matriarch of a wealthy white family in New Rochelle, N.Y., provides shelter to an African American washerwoman who is scared and alone after giving birth.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 14, 2019
For Sandy, the pressure to be respectable comes from Aunt Tempy, Aunt Hager’s oldest child, who avoids visiting her washerwoman mother in an effort to preserve the illusion of her middle-class upbringing.
From New York Times ● Jan. 2, 2018
He sat in the back of the Great Hall, not far from the horses, watching Abel, Rowan, and a mousy brown-haired washerwoman called Squirrel attack slabs of stale brown bread fried in bacon grease.
From "A Dance with Dragons" by George R. R. Martin
![]()
Naman Ramachandran, author of Rajinikanth: A Definitive Biography, notes that Rajinikanth's fans range from Wall Street bankers to washerwomen in Tamil Nadu.
From BBC ● Aug. 14, 2025
Jim Downs: Laundresses, washerwomen, cooks, any number of things.
From Scientific American ● Nov. 2, 2023
In Atlanta, she spoke of the washerwomen who went on strike in 1881; in New York she spoke of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory tragedy.
From Slate ● Mar. 5, 2020
In a speech in Atlanta in November, Warren said black washerwomen who led a successful strike in the 1880s for higher wages proved “the women stood together.”
From Washington Post ● Jan. 19, 2020
Though she had been too young to witness the spectacle herself, Cersei had heard the stories growing up from the mouths of washerwomen and guardsmen who had been there.
From "A Dance with Dragons" by George R. R. Martin
![]()
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.