Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun One who makes women's gowns; a dressmaker.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun One who makes dresses, cloaks, etc., for women; a dressmaker.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A maker of women's clothes, especially dresses

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

mantua +‎ maker, from mantua, a loose gown worn in the 18th century.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word mantuamaker.

Examples

  • She decidedly chooses rather to be a mantuamaker and milliner, than go to service.

    Letter 298 2009

  • It appears that Margaret Reay was the daughter of a stay-maker in Covent-garden, and served her apprenticeship to a mantuamaker.

    The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II Various

  • The white tontongee still girdled her loins; but Coomba's climate was her mantuamaker, and indicated more necessity for ornament than drapery.

    Captain Canot or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver Theodore Canot

  • Mrs. Rich, the favourite mantuamaker of those days, within whose power it lay to transform provincial newcomers, often already over-stocked with ill-made costumes and absurdly trimmed bonnets, into women of fashion!

    A belle of the fifties : memoirs of Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, covering social and political life in Washington and the South, 1853-66, 1905

  • When Claudia went one day to her mantuamaker to have her mourning fitted, she met a couple of ladies who had formerly been constant visitors at the house and regular attendants at her parties.

    Beulah 1872

  • With a plausible excuse, and seeming indifference, he gracefully opened conversation with the mantuamaker as only a Parisian can.

    Condensed Novels Bret Harte 1869

  • He would have wildly darted into the shop, but just then the figure of the mantuamaker appeared in the doorway.

    Condensed Novels Bret Harte 1869

  • They laughed brutally, -- these cruel minions of the law, -- and disengaged his arm from the waist of the wooden dummy which they had come to reclaim for the mantuamaker.

    Condensed Novels Bret Harte 1869

  • But what surprised them was that she requested them to address her as Madame Gonsalez, under cover to her mantuamaker in Savannah, whose address was given.

    A romance of the republic 1867

  • Ratisbon as "Lerch, the mantuamaker," had told him to keep watch, and impressed it upon him to let no one, no matter who it might be, enter her rooms on the ground floor except the cantor knight, as she called Wolf.

    Barbara Blomberg — Volume 03 Georg Ebers 1867

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.