Maid-of-all-work
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A female servant employed to do general housework.
"Now this honest little fellow being a bachelor, keeps but one servant, which he calls a maid of all work. When he gets drunk, which doth not happen above seven times a week, he is never so happy as when he is expatiating on the virtues of this virgin of his, especially her sobriety."
- 2 Any person who does a wide range of jobs in a supportive role; a thing that serves a wide range of purposes. broadly, humorous
"These colossal changes necessitate an attempt to adapt the constitution of 1789 to an entirely different kind of civilization from the one for which it was planned. The only significant change made to meet this new civilization is the great American maid-of-all-work, the Inter-State Commerce Commission."
Example
More examples"Now this honest little fellow being a bachelor, keeps but one servant, which he calls a maid of all work. When he gets drunk, which doth not happen above seven times a week, he is never so happy as when he is expatiating on the virtues of this virgin of his, especially her sobriety."
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.