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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



... then she got throwed into the streets and the prison by it? Who ever heard of a angel havin' to take in washin' to support a drunken son or father or husband? Who ever heard of a angel goin' out as wet nurse to get money to pay taxes on her home to a Government that in theory idolizes her, and practically despises her, and uses that same money in ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... mistress of the situation, and the very next day she made a conquest of each one of us. She was quite cracked, into the bargain, and must have been born with a glass of absinthe in her stomach, which her mother drank at the moment she was being delivered, and she never got sober since, for her wet nurse, so she said, recruited her strength with draughts of rum, and she never called the bottles which were standing in a line at the back of the wine merchant's shop anything ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... created an upheaval in the Samoncho[u] household. The wet nurse required brought with her a train of servants. With the child's growth this was maintained, even increased. The young lady (Ojo[u]san) found herself graduated into one with a status to maintain. All the niggardly habits of Matazaemon were thrown to the winds with the advent of this ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville


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