Eldmoder

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic term from Old English for a grandmother or a female ancestor in an earlier generation of a family
2. A historical word meaning a grandmother, or more broadly a woman of an older generation who stands as an ancestor
3. Old English usage denoting a grandmother or a distant female forebear, a relative from an earlier generation of kin

Etymology: "Eldmoder" is an Old English compound of "eld", meaning age or old age, and "moder", meaning mother. Its literal sense is "old mother" or "elder mother", and in Old English it was a term of respect for a grandmother, a senior female relative, or an aged woman of standing in a household. The "eld" element is the same root that gives modern English "elder" and "old," and it is related to "eald," the Old English ancestor of "old" itself. The word has been essentially obsolete for centuries, so its surviving record comes mostly from Old English texts and from dictionaries that preserve it as a historical term. Because it was built from transparent parts, a reader could work out its meaning from the components alone. It belongs to a productive pattern in Old English where "eld" combined with family words, such as "eldfæder" for grandfather, to mark a relative of the generation above.