BRIDESMAID

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does bridesmaid mean? 

• BRIDESMAID (noun)
  The noun BRIDESMAID has 1 sense:

1. an unmarried woman who attends the bride at a wedding

  Familiarity information: BRIDESMAID used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• BRIDESMAID (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

An unmarried woman who attends the bride at a wedding

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

bridesmaid; maid of honor

Hypernyms ("bridesmaid" is a kind of...):

attendant; attender; tender (someone who waits on or tends to or attends to the needs of another)

adult female; woman (an adult female person (as opposed to a man))

Holonyms ("bridesmaid" is a member of...):

wedding; wedding party (a party of people at a wedding)

 Context examples 

There were no groomsmen, no bridesmaids, no relatives to wait for or marshal: none but Mr. Rochester and I. Mrs. Fairfax stood in the hall as we passed.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

And really the great friendship and consideration of personally associating Sophy with the joyful occasion, and inviting her to be a bridesmaid in conjunction with Miss Wickfield, demands my warmest thanks.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

The bride was elegantly dressed; the two bridesmaids were duly inferior; her father gave her away; her mother stood with salts in her hand, expecting to be agitated; her aunt tried to cry; and the service was impressively read by Dr.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

It was a strange condition of things, the honeymoon being over, and the bridesmaids gone home, when I found myself sitting down in my own small house with Dora; quite thrown out of employment, as I may say, in respect of the delicious old occupation of making love.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Of Miss Lavinia, who acts as a semi-auxiliary bridesmaid, being the first to cry, and of her doing homage (as I take it) to the memory of Pidger, in sobs; of Miss Clarissa applying a smelling-bottle; of Agnes taking care of Dora; of my aunt endeavouring to represent herself as a model of sternness, with tears rolling down her face; of little Dora trembling very much, and making her responses in faint whispers.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

I was bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress—and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)