grass widow
- noun
- /ˈɡræs ˈwɪdoʊ/
- Archaic
:
viuda de hierba
- I know this because I've also been the other kind of grass widow, the one whose husband won't come back.
Examples
-
Among grass widows, I'm in a lofty position.
Fiction book (2000) -
Being a grass widow during the summer meant she had time to explore new hobbies while her husband was away.
-
- Just a floating grass widow.
-
I suspect that the impulse to blot days from the record is common to women stripped of their spouses and accounts for the notorious reputation of grass widows—the sense of careless women, loose ones, women willing to lie down in the grass.
Fiction book (2000) -
After a long week of work, she often felt like a grass widow, missing her husband who traveled frequently for his job.
-
As a grass widow, she learned to cherish her independence and found joy in spending time with her friends.
Synonyms
24
3.9
A woman whose marriage is over
1
8.2
A woman whose husband is often away because he plays a lot of golf
Surface Forms
Morphology
grass + widow
A B1 learner who knows 'grass' and 'widow' would not be able to derive the idiomatic sense from the parts: 'widow' normally denotes a woman whose husband has died, while 'grass' offers no clear, predictable modifier to indicate separation or absence. The phrase is historically and idiomatically opaque rather than compositional or cross-linguistically transparent, so its meaning must be learned as an idiom.
Etymology
Grass widow may come from a simple image: long ago people pictured a woman left alone out in the grass, so she looked like a widow even if her husband was only away. That's why the term came to mean 'a woman who is divorced, separated, or whose husband is away'.