Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A woman who imposes tasks, especially burdensome or laborious ones.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A woman who imposes a task, as in a household.

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

  • noun Female equivalent of taskmaster.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a woman taskmaster

Etymologies

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Examples

  • The Project Runway taskmistress is even less well-equipped to playing hidden-camera pranks like Candid Camera's Allen Funt: A bit in which she affixed big fake boogers to her nose was aptly titled "You Think It's Funny, But It's Snot."

    Cheers & Jeers: Heidi Klum — Surely She Can't Be Serious! 2011

  • I epublish with a magazine called The Edge of Propinquity, and my editor there is both amazing and a taskmistress like whoa.

    Transcript: A Conversation with Seanan McGuire and Lucy Snyder « Coyote Con 2010

  • The centaur was a harsh taskmistress - which was of course why she had been given the job.

    Labor Policy John Dermot Woods 2010

  • The taskmistress could have taken the coins and sold my secret to a real thrush, without letting me guess she had peeped.

    Wildfire Sarah Micklem 2009

  • The taskmistress of the napkins was a woman of eminence among tharais, and she wanted me to know it.

    Wildfire Sarah Micklem 2009

  • Why do top designers, artists, stylists and photographers want to work for a caprice-and-fiat-driven taskmistress who's never heard an idea she didn't like and dismisses their best work out of hand?

    What Happened to Anna Wintour's October Issue? 2009

  • The taskmistress of the napkins scraped powder from my cheeks with the knuckles of her left hand, a gesture that said more clearly than words that I was tharais and not beyond her reach.

    Wildfire Sarah Micklem 2009

  • Suppose dawn arrived before the porter, and some taskmistress caught me in tharos garb in the manufactory, and took me to Gnathin?

    Wildfire Sarah Micklem 2009

  • Again I asked her pardon, saying I was a strange-ignorant person, and furthermore I used to be tharos before they banished me from the manufactory for striking the taskmistress.

    Wildfire Sarah Micklem 2009

  • I do believe the taskmistress of the napkins was pleased when I gave her the gold coin, though she had a queer way of showing it.

    Wildfire Sarah Micklem 2009

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