husband
/ˈhʌzbənd
/- Dave and Paula will be appearing on a show devoted to wives telling how their husbands have developed obsessions.
- Lots of husbands and wives have their own special song that reminds them of each other.
- I was a mother, I had been a wife, but my husband was gone and most of my children had left home.
Synonyms
- While some players were tapping deep into their reserves, those with pretensions to the title were husbanding their resources in preparation for the second week.
- As gatekeepers, general practitioners are accustomed to husbanding the scarce resources of the NHS, and this might look like a logical extension of their role.
- They have also argued that they are husbanding their energies and resources for the next general election.
Synonyms
Derivatives
husbander
- With backgrounds in document management, librarianship, and archiving, the herders, hoarders, and husbanders of documents see these activities as the keys to managing knowledge.
- A husbander, not a squanderer, of resources, which is a good attitude to have at the very beginning of a long, possibly endless, campaign.
- Retiring in disposition, and a rigid husbander of time, Mr. Hall holds himself aloof from all literary societies, and has from the first persistently avoided all entanglement with cliques and coteries.
husbandhood
- Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under the law.
- Juggling fatherhood and husbandhood with editing and writing doubtless keeps you on your toes.
- This is difficult to imagine, because his regular column writings on the delights of husbandhood and parenthood paint a picture of an enchanted, if idiosyncratic, domestic existence.
husbandless
- In this age of easy divorces a husbandless mother attracts little attention.
- But that's not all, for now I am husbandless as well as pregnant.
- A fatherless child and husbandless mother were looked down on greatly, and that was one reputation I did not seek for myself or for my child.
husbandly
- I told him it was his husbandly duty to go out with me sometimes, so I can show him off.
- Following the meal, elders from the groom's family spoke to the bride about wifely duties, and elders from the bride's family told the groom about husbandly responsibilities.
- She leaves their home, releasing him of all husbandly duties, and informing him that all the servants will do a better job of taking care of the house and children than she ever could.
Origin
Late Old English (in the senses 'male head of a household' and 'manager, steward'), from Old Norse húsbóndi 'master of a house', from hús 'house' + bóndi 'occupier and tiller of the soil'. The original sense of the verb was 'till, cultivate'.
In Old English a wife was simply ‘a woman’, and a husband was ‘a male head of a household’ or ‘a manager or steward’, a sense preserved in expressions such as to husband your resources. The word is from Old Norse húsbondí ‘master of a house’. Not until the 13th century or so did a husband become the married partner of a woman. Around then the word also took on the meaning ‘a farmer or cultivator’ and also the verb use ‘to cultivate’, both of which are no longer used but are preserved in husbandry (Middle English), ‘the cultivation and care of crops and farm animals’.