old woman
2
9.9
- noun
- US
:
Artemisia stelleriana
- In the village, the old woman is known for her herbal remedies that help the sick feel better.
Examples
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The old woman tended to her flower garden every morning, nurturing the plants with care.
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Older women are having healthy babies every day.
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The other was a charming, older woman who suggested I take French lessons from her.
Blog text (27) -
We older women know you're desperately in love with him.
Fiction book (1994) -
Eating the right combination of foods for 15 days can fight off oxidative DNA damage in older women.
Blog text (27) -
She's an older woman, who's always been like a mother figure to both Mark and me.
Blog text (29) -
By the time I returned to the porch, however, the two old women were onto some other topic of dissension, fairly mild.
Fiction book (1994) -
A plump, older woman sat at one of the tables, contentedly smiling.
Fiction book (1994) -
An old woman with wisdom in her eyes shared stories of her youth with the children in the park.
Synonyms
A low plant with soft silvery leaves often grown in gardens near the coast
A plant with greyish leaves that grows on sandy coasts of eastern North America and is grown in gardens
A garden plant with soft silvery leaves used for decoration
Surface Forms
Morphology
A B1 learner who knows 'old' and 'woman' will interpret the phrase as referring to an elderly female human, so the plant meaning (a herbaceous species) cannot be derived from the literal constituents. This is a lexicalized folk name for a plant and thus language- and culture-specific, making the MWE's meaning unpredictable from its parts.
Etymology
Old woman as a plant name may come from the grey leaves that remind people of the hair of an old woman. Gardeners used this image to name the coastal plant, so the name now means 'a plant with grey leaves often grown in coastal gardens'.