Preceptress

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A female preceptor, or provider of moral instruction; a teacher. archaic

    "‘I daily became more amiable, and might perhaps by this time have nearly attained perfection, had not my Preceptoress been torn from my arms, e'er I had attained by seventeenth year.’"

Example

More examples

"‘I daily became more amiable, and might perhaps by this time have nearly attained perfection, had not my Preceptoress been torn from my arms, e'er I had attained by seventeenth year.’"

Etymology

From preceptor + -ess.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.