Stepdame

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic term for a woman who has married one's father after the death or divorce of one's mother, serving as a stepmother
2. A former word meaning a stepmother, the wife of a man who has children from an earlier marriage
3. Old-fashioned name for a stepmother, a female parent by marriage rather than by birth to a child

Etymology: "Stepdame" is a compound of "step-" and "dame," and the parts tell most of the story. "Step-" comes from Old English "steop-," which denotes a relation by remarriage rather than by blood, and "dame" was a common Middle English word for a lady or mistress of a household, so a stepdame was originally a mother-figure formed the same way as the older "stepmother." The pairing shows how the prefix was attached to kin terms across the family: stepfather, stepson, stepdaughter and stepdame all follow one pattern. The word is recorded in Middle English, and it has since become rare. Most speakers now use "stepmother," which won out over "stepdame" as the standard term, leaving "stepdame" as an archaic or literary variant. Its survival owes much to the older English vocabulary for family that it preserves.

Synonyms: stepmother