white woman
- noun
- /waɪt ˈwʊmən/
- This isn't the best place for a white woman to be.
- a young white woman
- a middle-class white woman
- marry a white woman
We do have special meanings for white women and white men.
- We do have special meanings for white women and white men.
- So this is from a white woman who writes.
- But then, like, I'm the only black man in line with all these white women to see Sex and the City at midnight.
- My publisher, Penguin Portfolio, Random House, I went to their website and all the senior leadership were white women.
- And it was all because a white woman had pointed his photo out of a pile of mug shots and said that he had killed her husband.
- White man, black man, white woman, black woman.
- Angie, I'll tell you what what we have right here is white women determined in a large part the state of this election.
- And I want all black women in this country, country for you to know, not all white women and white men are pieces of shit like MAGA.
- What if it's the, the TV version of women talking, which was all right, white women in the cult.
- One of the most interesting sections of the book has to do with white women in particular, who, you know, really seem to.
- Of course they, but not on the basis of being white women, again, especially when they are pitted against black folk.
Examples
-
I ran inside and told her that a white woman was at the door.
Fiction book (1993) -
The conference included a panel discussion featuring successful white women from various industries.
-
Do you want a white woman?
-
"Goodbye!" As we were leaving the building, a white woman came up to us.
Fiction book (1993) -
You see a grown white woman wearing a size small.
-
If she were a white woman, she could have just thrown her brother out.
Fiction book (1994) -
People will never understand how it fails to be a white woman in America with everything that she has.
-
A few months before the murder, Johnny D. got caught messing around with a white woman in town.
-
Asian women participated highly in hospital groups, and white women had the greatest participation in environmental groups.
Academic text (1998) -
The data from the remaining 84 White women and 33 Black women were used in the analyses.
Academic text (1996)
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a woman who is identified as White / has light skin' is directly and transparently derived from combining the adjective 'white' with the noun 'woman'; there is no idiomatic shift. This adjective+noun compositional pattern is common across languages and follows standard English modification rules, so a B1 learner who knows both words will understand the MWE.
Etymology
White woman is a simple phrase that comes from how people used color words to describe skin: white meant pale or light skin and woman meant an adult female. So calling someone a white woman names her by her skin tone, and today it is used to refer to a woman identified as 'white' or having 'light skin'.