shop girl
- noun
- UK
- Accordingly, romance comics featured high school students, college coeds, secretaries, nurses, shop girls, young wives, and even some young mothers.
Examples
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The shop girl greeted me with a warm smile as I entered the store.
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Can you imagine me as a shop girl?
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I was a shop girl.
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You were always the shop girl who fought her way to the top, made a great success.
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Well, you're not a little shop girl anymore.
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I lie awake at night, and all I can think is I should have been a shop girl or a stenographer.
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So have writers, businesswomen, scholars, shop girls, secretaries, a couple of lawyers, and a few single moms.
Blog text (12) -
While working as a shop girl, she developed excellent customer service skills.
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The shop girl patiently helped me find the perfect dress for the party.
Synonyms
A young woman who sells things in a shop
A woman who sells things in a shop to customers
A young woman who works in a shop selling things to customers
A person who helps customers and sells things in a shop
A person who helps customers buy things in a store
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a young woman who works as a sales assistant in a shop' is directly derivable from combining 'shop' (a place of retail) with 'girl' (a female person), yielding a female worker associated with a shop. This noun–noun compounding pattern is regular and cross‑linguistically common, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily infer the meaning.
Etymology
Shop girl comes from a simple, literal naming: the words shop (the place that sells things) and girl (a young woman) were put together long ago to mean a young woman who works in a shop. So, it now means 'a young woman who works as a sales assistant'.