spinster or left-over woman
经常看到用left-over woman 来形容剩女，今日偶查spinster的E-E解释，例如COD的解释an unmarried woman, typically an older woman beyond the usual age for marriage，抛开贬义不贬义，至少从意思上spinster非常契合“剩女”的中文意思，而left-over woman反而啰嗦、累赘，也是某种程度上coin出来的词，不如spinster好。 本帖最后由 elusty 于 2016-10-17 19:38 编辑The development of the word spinster is a good example of the way in which a word acquires strong connotations to the extent that it can no longer be used in a neutral sense. From the 17th century the word was appended to names as the official legal description of an unmarried woman: Elizabeth Harris of London, Spinster. This type of use survives today in some legal and religious contexts. In modern everyday English, however, spinster cannot be used to mean simply ‘unmarried woman’; it is now always a derogatory term, referring or alluding to a stereotype of an older woman who is unmarried, childless, prissy, and repressed
The Online Etymological Dictionary says of the word origin and history:
spinster: mid-14c., "female spinner of thread," from M.E. spinnen (see spin) + -stere, feminine suffix. Spinning commonly done by unmarried women, hence the word came to denote "an unmarried woman" in legal documents from 1600s to early 1900s, and by 1719 was being used generically for "woman still unmarried and beyond the usual age for it."
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/spinster
看了几个词典的解释，貌似 spinster 更多指的老处女。
柯林斯双解的解释：
N-COUNT 可数名词(老)处女;未婚中年(或老年)女子 A spinster is a woman who has never been married; used especially when talking about an old or middle-aged woman.
【STYLE标签】：OLD-FASHIONED 过时
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