Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A woman who is the eldest or senior member of a group.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. a female doyen.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a woman who is the senior member of a group
Etymologies
- Borrowing from French. (Wiktionary)
- French, feminine of doyen, senior member; see doyen. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Huffington Post's co-founder Arianna Huffington, is often described as the doyenne of the liberal political commentary in the United States and is a regular fixture on the cable TV news circuit opining on political news of the day.”
“Who actually thinks Andrea Mitchell is a "doyenne" of the left?”
“The "doyenne" of the fawning press corps was also shown going after President Reagan on the trumped-up "Iran-Contra" case.”
“Helen Thomas, Dean (or "doyenne") of the press corps, for the first time in several decades, was relegated to the third row and was not allowed to ask Bush a question (she's known to ask tough questions and would not play ball in the charade) 4.”
“Author John Tiffany sheds light on this fascinating doyenne in his new book, "Eleanor Lambert: Still Here.”
“Designer Christian Dior called Parker "the most beautiful woman in the world"; Eileen Ford, doyenne of modeling agents, once said of her: '' She was everybody's everything. '”
“In The Thorn Birds, Father Ralph is in unwilling thrall to rich Mary Carson, the doyenne of the region, on whom his hopes for a big donation to the Catholic church reside.”
Father Ralph and Humbert Humbert « Tales from the Reading Room
“Of course, Martha, the gardener and doyenne of home-cooking, is a model of green and healthy living, so it was natural for "the environment" to be the theme of the show.”
The Huffington Post: Wendy Gordon: I Was on The Martha Stewart Show!
“The garden is a war zone," the doyenne of landscape design averred.”
“On one evening, Kathleen held a dinner party for Pamela Harriman, then the great doyenne of Washington Democratic society.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘doyenne’.
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250 Spelling Words
A selected sampling of words for intermediate and advanced spellers.
orecchiette, rhabdomancy, guayabera, orthoepy, opisthenar, maguey, proem, ciabatta, cioppino, banns, concinnity, asthenia and 237 more...
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Steampunk
Words used quite often in steampunk
ansible, airship, chymical, valve, clockwork, dirigible, thaumaturgy, copper, bronze, difference engine, gear, rivets and 516 more...
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Anglo-Norman
English words of Norman-French origin.
wage, wait, war, wicket, warranty, guarantee, guard, warden, guardian, glamour, grammar, catch and 30 more...
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gre2
aberrant, aberration, aboveboard, abrasive, abstemious, acme, admonish, affable, affluent, alacrity, allegory, alleviate and 1824 more...
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The Journalists' Vocabulary Challenge
http://oncampus.richmond.edu/academics/journalism/vocab.html
prosaic, penultimate, obstreperous, egregious, eleemosynary, fulsome, amorphous, arcane, oleaginous, atavistic, fecund, putative and 89 more...
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Good for Academics
Gahh!! Study!
supplant, usurp, finagle, winnow, draconian, abut, collude, swindle, objectify, incite, decadent, obstinate and 327 more...
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Need to Know!
elicit, educe, refute, cogency, churlish, martinet, veritable, polyglot, dissemble, histrionics, prevarication, verbiage and 166 more...
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bintalshamsa's list
My Favorite Words
weltschmerz, perspicacity, idée fixe, invigilator, salubrious, tchotchke, ex nihilo, invidious, malapropism, naïve, sardonic, elide and 1401 more...
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vmarinelli's Words
canard, gumption, inexorable, insouciance, inviolable, mordant, euphonious, sawbuck, carpe diem, pay dirt, adipocere, profligate and 496 more...
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colleen's words ii
sibilant, sundry, spindle, distaff, device, mortar, pestle, scythe, flail, thresh, frown, elementary and 495 more...
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newGRE
mostly from magoosh
imbue, verge on, nonchalant, deliberate, timorous, futile, provisional, dissect, checked, tinged, alluring, visionary and 1046 more...
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SCRUBJAYS IDIOM
EXTRAPOLATE, altruistic, misanthropic, predicate, pejoritive, disparaging, bucolic, sylvan, veracity, autodidact, jejune, erudite and 110 more...
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sionnach's Words
contumely, fomite, holmgang, poltroon, eleemosynary, obsidian, nugatory, grindcore, felch, recrudescent, pyx, parenteral and 3271 more...
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C. S. Bird – Grandiloquent Dictionary
All the words from the Grandiloquent Dictionary.
946 of these 2700 words do not yield any results in six different dictionaries, hence many of them might be misspellings.
More in...abacinate, abcedarian, abderian, ablegate, abligurition, ablutophobia, abnormous, acarophobia, acathasia, accipitrine, accidia, accubitus and 2690 more...
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learning
A list of words whose meanings I am learning, either because a) I don't know the meaning b) I know the meaning, but could stand to better appreciate certain inflections or secondary meanings or c) ...
louche, educe, loam, cob, sclerotic, palliate, axial, syndicalist, ecumenical, sally, fatuous, parvenu and 1381 more...
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GRE
predisposed, browbeaten, hegemonic, corollary, mendacity, remnant, futile, touchstone, upshot, intuition, perseverance, perk and 214 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for doyenne.
tbtabby Granny Weatherwax is this for witches. Dec 4, 2012
seanahan From the article John recently linked on Errata, New York Times Magazine
"That particular week in early November was a good one for country pop; landing ahead of Krauss on the charts, at No. 1, was Carrie Underwood, the “American Idol�? ingénue whose second album, “Carnival Ride,�? sold more than 500,000 copies in its first week. And Reba McEntire, the country doyenne, also reached No. 1 a few weeks before that with an album of duets." Jan 14, 2008
bilby "I vacillate wildly between a number of archetypes including, but not limited to, Muriel Spark witticism-trading doyenne, Mariella Frostrup charismatic socialite, brooding, intense Marianne Faithful visionary, and kleptomaniac Germaine Greer amateur upholsterer and ladies’ league darts champion. Woman, 43. Everything I just said was a lie. Apart from the bit about darts. And kleptomania. Great tits though."
- London Review of Books, personal ad, 29 Dec 2007. Dec 30, 2007
valse see doyen Jan 4, 2007