Computress
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Female equivalent of computer (a person employed to perform computations; one who computes) feminine, form-of, obsolete, uncommon
"Picture a girl, we usually call her a computress, using a desk calculator. Suppose we had given her a sheet of paper containing several columns of numbers and suppose further we had given her a set of written instructions directing her to sum each column of numbers and then to divide each sum by the number of entries in its column so as to find the average of each column, and finally to enter this value below the appropriate column. Notice that the computress in this task performs […]"
Example
More examples"Picture a girl, we usually call her a computress, using a desk calculator. Suppose we had given her a sheet of paper containing several columns of numbers and suppose further we had given her a set of written instructions directing her to sum each column of numbers and then to divide each sum by the number of entries in its column so as to find the average of each column, and finally to enter this value below the appropriate column. Notice that the computress in this task performs […]"
Etymology
From computer + -ess.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.