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Glite Dictionary
widow's weeds

widow's weeds

1 9.9
Black clothes a woman wears after her husband dies to show she is mourning
  • noun
  • /ˈwɪdoʊz widz/
  • Archaic
translation icon : vestidos de viuda
  • The old lady kept her widow's weeds neatly pressed in her wardrobe, a reminder of her late husband.

Examples

  • In the past, it was customary for a widow to wear widow's weeds during her mourning period.

  • It's tempting fate to have thrown away your widow's weeds.

    Oscar and Lucinda (1997)

  • One more day and my widow's weeds would've strangled me!

    Snow White and the Three Stooges (1961)

  • A widow's weeds aren't much help to a lady of the garrison.

    The Duellists (1977)

  • Her widow's weeds have decayed until they look like a tattered second skin.

    Fiction book (1999)

  • The statue (now in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo) depicts Anna dressed in widow's weeds and gesturing devoutly (Fig. 4).

    Academic text (1994)

  • After her husband's funeral, she wore widow's weeds to honor his memory.

Synonyms

black
vswidow's weeds
11 1.4

Clothes worn to show mourning after someone's death

is specifically the traditional mourning dress for a woman who lost her husband
weeds
vswidow's weeds
  • Archaic
1 9.9

Black clothes that a widow wears to show mourning

is the more specific traditional phrase rather than the archaic single word
funeral attire
vswidow's weeds
3.4

Dark, formal clothes people wear to show respect at a funeral

is narrower referring to a woman's traditional mourning garments after losing her husband

Surface Forms

widow's weeds singular
widow's weed plural
widows' weeds plural

Morphology

widow's + weeds

The phrase is simply a possessive construction: 'widow's' (possessive of widow) + 'weeds' (here meaning garments/dress), so the overall meaning — garments worn by a widow for mourning — is directly derivable from the constituents. Note that the clothing sense of 'weeds' is somewhat archaic, but under the prompt condition that the learner knows the constituent meanings, the expression is compositional and therefore transparent.

Etymology

Widow's weeds comes from old English, where weeds meant 'clothes' or 'garments'. Because widows used to wear black clothes while 'mourning' after a husband's death, the phrase came to mean those black mourning clothes.