au pair girl
1
6.3
- noun
- /oʊ pɛr ɡɜrl/
- Archaic
:
niñera au pair
- As an au pair girl, she lived with the family and was responsible for looking after their toddler.
Examples
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The family hired an au pair girl to help take care of their children while they worked.
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And then she sort of turned to me and looked at me through the window and smiled, actually, and I realised that that was the au pair girl, Colleen.
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And then she said, "I had an au pair girl "who got lots of letters from him too."
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It supplies baby-sitters and au pair girls to some of the most important families.
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During her year abroad, she enjoyed the experience of being an au pair girl in a welcoming home.
Synonyms
7
5.8
A young person from another country who lives with a family and helps look after children for room and food
Surface Forms
Morphology
The core unit here is the loanphrase 'au pair' (from French) meaning a young person living with a host family to provide childcare; the constituents 'au' (not a productive English morpheme), 'pair' (two similar items) and 'girl' (young female) do not transparently combine to yield that institutional meaning. An average B1 learner who only knows the literal meanings of the parts would not predict the host-family/childcare sense, so this is a language-specific borrowed idiom rather than a compositional phrase (speakers of French or other languages that borrow the term may recognize it, but most B1 learners will not).
Etymology
Au pair girl comes from the French phrase au pair, which literally means 'on equal terms'. It gives the image of a young girl living with a family and helping with children and housework in return for room and meals, so the phrase means 'a young foreign woman who lives with and helps a family'.