wild woman
- noun
- /waɪld ˈwʊmən/
- Offensive
- She danced under the stars, completely free and carefree, embodying the spirit of a wild woman.
Examples
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God, she is a wild woman.
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She's a wild woman, Sunny.
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"The wild woman never spent a dollar in her life, but she's worth millions"
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She's a wild, wild woman... (He hands Moore a Polaroid, he took at the bar.)
Fiction book (2001) -
The men, sitting around the campfire, turn to see Mooring standing in the tent entrance, a wild woman if they had ever seen one, dressed in dirt and bones.
Fiction book (2001) -
In her artwork, she embraced chaos and creativity, portraying herself as a wild woman unapologetically breaking social norms.
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With her untamed hair and fierce attitude, she was known as the local wild woman, never afraid to speak her mind.
Synonyms
A woman who lives away from other people and lacks usual social skills
How Wild
- Offensive
- Offensive
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositionally derived from 'wild' (untamed, uncontrolled) modifying 'woman' (an adult female), so a learner who knows both words can infer a woman who behaves in an uncontrolled or uncivilized way. This adjective+noun pattern is a standard, cross-linguistic descriptive construction, so despite possible cultural connotations the core meaning is predictable for a B1 learner.
Etymology
The phrase wild woman comes from old stories of a woman who lived alone in the forest and seemed part of the wild, free and not following the village rules. People used that picture to call someone a wild woman, so today it means 'behaving outside social rules'.