Citations:woman

English citations of woman

Noun: an adult female human being

• 1380-1400, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales- The Parson's Tale:

  This is a veray mariage that was established by God, er that sinne began, whan naturel lawe was in his right point in paradis; and it was ordeined, that o man shuld have but o woman, and o woman but o man, as sayth Seint Augustine, by many resons.

• 1516, Thomas More, Utopia:

  If either the man or the woman be proved to have actually offended before theire marriage, with an other, the partye that so hathe trespaced is sharpelye punished.

• 1598, William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost:

  I can but say their protestation over;
  So much, dear liege, I have already sworn,
  That is, to live and study here three years.
  But there are other strict observances:
  As, not to see a woman in that term,

• 1611, The Holy Bible,  (King James Version), London: Robert Barker, , →OCLC, Genesis 2:22:

  And the rib which the LORD God had taken from man, made hee a woman, & brought her vnto the man.

• 1644, Samuel Rutherford, The Due Right of Presbyteries:

  A woman may occasionally declare one point of the Gospel, that Maries Sonne is Christ.

• 1658, Joseph Caryl, An Exposition with Practicall Observations Continued Upon the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, Twentieth, and Twenty-one Chapters of the Book of Job:

  But is not the woman also the image and glory of God? The woman may be considered either first according to her specificall nature, and so shee was created according to the image of God in righteousnesse and holinesse, as well as the man, or secondly, according to her sex and personal relation to her husband, and in that regard, the woman is not the image of God but the man, because dominion is the image of God, and not subjection, which is the womans duty.

• 1709, Susanna Centlivre, The Busybody:

  What is the master-stroke and smile of the creation, but charming virtuous woman?

• 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman:

  The moral trustworthiness of the run of women is accepted by most of us, in our every day life, as part of the natural order of things on which we can rely on as implicitly as on the continuity of the force of nature.

• 1793, William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy:

  The history of the woman taken in adultery, recorded in the eighth chapter of Saint John's Gospel, has been thought by some to to give countenance to that crime.

• 1828, John Ledyard, The Life and Travels of John Ledyard:

  I have observed among all nations that the women ornament themselves more than the men 

• 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin:

  Tom was soon busy at work; but, as the woman was at no great distance from him, he often glanced an eye to her, at her work.

• 1854, Charles Dickens, Hard Times- For These Times:

  It was an old woman, tall and shapely still, though withered by time, on whom his eyes fell when he stopped and turned.

• 1954, J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers:

  Behind his chair stood a woman clad in white.

• 1985, Antonia Fraser, Oxford Blood:

  Sister Imelda's hands resembled those of a top-class surgeon, not least because they were notable big hands for a woman.

• 1994, “Glory Box”, in Dummy, performed by Portishead:

  Give me a reason to love you / Give me a reason to be a woman / I just wanna be a woman

• 1999, “Shanghai”, in The Book of the World, 2nd United States edition (Atlas), Macmillan, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 411, column 2:

  "A woman can wear anything in Shanghai!" The city's women dress more daringly here than in most other Chinese cities.

• 2003, Alan Dundes, Parsing Through Customs: Essays by a Freudian Folklorist, page 161:

  It is true that in male initiation ritual, men pretend to give birth to other males and that the creation of Eve from Adam's body is a ritual reversal of biological reality, insofar as men are created from women's bodies, ...

• 2012, Joan C. Williams, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter (→ISBN):

  Before separate spheres arose in the late eighteenth century, many women worked as blacksmiths, woodworkers, printers, tinsmiths, brewers, tavern keepers, shopkeepers, shoemakers, barbers, and shipwrights.

Noun: female human of any age

• 2003, Tiffany Field, Touch, MIT Press (→ISBN), page 56:

  At all ages, beginning from birth, women have lower touch and pain thresholds than men, ...

• 2003, Amelia Jones, The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, Psychology Press (→ISBN), page 37:

  To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men.

• 2012, Maxwell Billieon, Ray J, Death of the Cheating Man: What Every Woman Must Know About Men Who Stray, Simon and Schuster (→ISBN):

  That meant that from birth, women were trained to get a husband who was well-bred by his parents and extended family to continue the family name.

Noun: female human, as contrasted with non-humans

• 2010, Karlton B. Douglas, THE DRAGONHORN, Karlton B. Douglas

  “could you embrace a woman, or elf, despoiled by another.” “I don't like that word: despoiled. One who is victim of a rape is not made less than they were, nor somehow tainted in any way,

• 2016, David Gerspach, Broken Circle: Verdan Chronicles: Volume 4, Lulu.com (→ISBN), page 206:

  In a fit of rage she took a spear she held and thrust into his lower abdomen claiming that he would make love to no woman or elf ever again.

Noun: female non-human

without a directly preceding modifier

• 2007, Clifford B. Bowyer, The Siege of Zoldex, Silver Leaf Books, LLC (→ISBN), page 307:

  One of the elves, a woman with long auburn hair, was garbed identically to the two dwarves.

• 2014, Carolynn Gockel, Warriors: When the Newest Incarnation of Loki, Norse God of Mischief and Chaos Meets Science, What Could Go Wrong?:

  one of the elves, a woman, protests.

• 2014, Oisin McGann, Kings of the Realm: Cruel Salvation, Penguin UK (→ISBN):

  There was a pair of burly dwarves – a woman and a man – bearing the markings of the formidable Thane Guards.

with a modifier

• 2006, Clare B. Dunkle, Close Kin: Book II -- The Hollow Kingdom Trilogy, Henry Holt and Company (BYR) (→ISBN):

  “Maybe just elf women are that way. But I know it's the truth. I know! I've seen the women die.” “She's right,” said Seylin in the pause that followed. “Elf women are different from goblin women. They have a very hard time with childbirth, "

contrasted, with a modifier, with unmodified "woman" for a human woman

• 2016, Joel Newsome, Elves, Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC (→ISBN), page 44:

  The elf woman begs her to leave 2 quarts (1.9 liters) of milk in a corner of her house every day so that she can feed her child. The woman promises to do what the elf woman asks, and when she awakens, she decides to keep her promise.

God

• 2018, Theodore Ihejieto, The Existence, page 269:

  The Existence is telling human beings that God was a woman and not a man, because God was Earth.

Noun: "woman" standing for women, collectively or in general

• 1972, John Lennon, Woman Is the Nigger of the World:

  Woman Is the Nigger of the World

Verb: to staff with women: to serve, as women, in a position

• 1955, Rex Stout, "The Next Witness", in Three Witnesses, October 1994 Bantam edition, →ISBN, page 61:

  Bella Velardi and Alice Hart were on the other side, next to the aisle. Apparently the Sixty-ninth Street office of Bagby Answers, Inc., was being womaned for the day from other offices.