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Wet nurse   /wɛt nərs/   Listen
noun
Nurse  n.  
1.
One who nourishes; a person who supplies food, tends, or brings up; as:
(a)
A woman who has the care of young children; especially, one who suckles an infant not her own.
(b)
A person, especially a woman, who has the care of the sick or infirm.
2.
One who, or that which, brings up, rears, causes to grow, trains, fosters, or the like. "The nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise."
3.
(Naut.) A lieutenant or first officer, who is the real commander when the captain is unfit for his place.
4.
(Zool.)
(a)
A peculiar larva of certain trematodes which produces cercariae by asexual reproduction. See Cercaria, and Redia.
(b)
Either one of the nurse sharks.
Nurse shark. (Zool.)
(a)
A large arctic shark (Somniosus microcephalus), having small teeth and feeble jaws; called also sleeper shark, and ground shark.
(b)
A large shark (Ginglymostoma cirratum), native of the West Indies and Gulf of Mexico, having the dorsal fins situated behind the ventral fins.
To put to nurse, or To put out to nurse, to send away to be nursed; to place in the care of a nurse.
Wet nurse, Dry nurse. See Wet nurse, and Dry nurse, in the Vocabulary.


Wet nurse  n.  A nurse who suckles a child, especially the child of another woman. Cf. Dry nurse.





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Wet nurse" Quotes from Famous Books



... do not think it "good style" to bring up their own children, and the Asturian wet nurse is as much a part of the ordinary household as the coachman or mayordomo. They are singularly handsome, well-grown women, and become great favourites in the houses of their employers; but, like their menkind, they ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... much as smiled at her. A beautiful baby, I thought, looking much like her mother. Zaidee was smaller and more delicate, though never ill that I can recall. She decided to take Marguerite and the wet nurse who was very proud of her charge and fond of Mrs. Crawford. When we heard of the frightful disaster you may remember that I went out at once. It was a most dreary place, just a sort of freight station where the tracks crossed the through road. It could not be called ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... born at Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris, on the 14th of August, 1818. Immediately after my birth, and as soon as the Chancellor of France, M. Dambray, had declared me to be a boy, I was made over to the care of a wet nurse and another attendant. Three years later I passed out of female hands, earlier, somewhat, than is generally the case, for a little accident befell my nurse, in which my eldest brother's tutor, an unfrocked priest, as he was then discovered to be, was also concerned. My earliest memory, and a very ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... children in the master's family. Wickliff, the oldest boy and Bob was the second child in age. The younger child, a girl, was named Sally and was about the same age as the subject of this article. Both children, being babies about the same age, the black mother served as a wet nurse for the white child, sometimes both the black child and the white child were upon the black mammies lap which frequently was the cause of battles ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... swing it on yer? It's yer own bleed'n' fault! D'yer think I'm goin' ter stand over yer all day? Some o' you blokes is as 'elpless as a lot o' kids—yer want a wet nurse to ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt


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