Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A household servant, especially one who is a young woman.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A domestic drudge; a maid-servant.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun Colloq. & Jocose Eng. A maidservant.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun colloquial A
maid ,maidservant .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a female domestic servant who does all kinds of menial work
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word slavey.
Examples
-
He has been instructed to bring soda whenever he hears the word slavey pronounced from above.
The Newcomes 2006
-
He has been instructed to bring soda whenever he hears the word slavey pronounced from above.
The Newcomes William Makepeace Thackeray 1837
-
Punch was the champion of the "slavey" -- immortalized in Dickens's "Marchioness" -- even of the much-maligned charwoman; the relentless critic of Jeames, his plush and powder and calves.
Mr. Punch`s history of modern England, Volume I -- 1841-1857 Charles Larcom 1921
-
It is opened after a longer or shorter interval by the "slavey" -- in the morning, slatternly, her arms concealed beneath her apron; in the afternoon, smart in dirty cap and apron.
Paul Kelver, a Novel 1893
-
And here to the doorstep came the "slavey," very frowzy and very perplexed, to tell me that the missus would let me come back and wait in the kitchen.
JOHNNY UPRIGHT 2010
-
The derisive slang term "slavey" expresses the generally prevalent public contempt.
Vocational Guidance for Girls Marguerite Stockman Dickson
-
And she never did any work that could possibly be handed over to Dick, and the boy was in very truth the "slavey" they called him, and he rarely had enough to eat.
Dick Lionheart Mary Rowles Jarvis
-
A man forty-eight, his wife forty-five, three boys fourteen to nineteen, a girl sixteen years of age, a married son, twenty-two, with his wife and baby, living in the same house, another baby coming, and a little "slavey" given food and lodging and clothing for doing the work.
-
Build, cheapen, render alluring a simpler, more spacious type of house for the clerk, fill it with labour-saving conveniences, and leave no excuse and no spare corners for the "slavey," and the slavey -- and all that she means in mental and moral consequence -- will vanish out of being.
-
In those days only very prosperous people had more than such an equipage, and it is to be remarked that every drop of water Parload used had to be carried by an unfortunate servant girl, -- the "slavey," Parload called her -- up from the basement to the top of the house and subsequently down again.
MaryW commented on the word slavey
Charles Rowan Beye, My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 115March 6, 2016