odd-job woman
- noun
- UK
- As an odd-job woman, she helped with everything from gardening to small household repairs.
Examples
-
The neighbors hired an odd-job woman to fix their creaky door and repaint the fence.
-
The odd-job woman fixed my leaky faucet.
-
The local community center employs an odd-job woman for weekly maintenance tasks.
-
Can you recommend an odd-job woman for painting?
-
As an odd-job woman, she helped with everything from gardening to small household repairs.
-
The local community center employs an odd-job woman for weekly maintenance tasks.
-
The neighbors hired an odd-job woman to fix their creaky door and repaint the fence.
Synonyms
A man who does small repair jobs around the home
A woman who fixes things and does small jobs around the house
A woman who fixes things and looks after equipment in a building
A female worker who does different jobs when needed
A woman who fixes machines, equipment, or buildings
A woman who repairs machines or household appliances
Antonyms
How Skilled
Surface Forms
Morphology
odd-job + woman
The meaning 'a woman who does odd jobs' is directly and compositionally derived from 'odd-job' (small, miscellaneous tasks) + 'woman' (an adult female). This follows a common noun + noun pattern (cf. 'odd-job man' / 'handyman') and is cross-linguistically transparent, so a B1 learner who knows the constituents should be able to infer the meaning.
Etymology
Odd-job woman may come from the phrase odd job, which means a small, one-time task. Picture a woman with a bag of tools who moves from one small job to another, like gardening, fixing doors and painting, so the phrase means 'a woman who does various small tasks or repairs'.