girlchild
English
Alternative forms
Etymology
Noun
girlchild (plural girlchildren)
- A female child.
- 1911, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, chapter 2, in The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture[1]:
- The male is esteemed "the head of the family;" it belongs to him; he maintains it; and the rest of the world is a wide hunting ground and battlefield wherein he competes with other males as of old. ¶ The girl-child, peering out, sees this forbidden field as belonging wholly to men-kind; and her relation to it is to secure one for herself—not only that she may love, but that she may live.
- 1941, Emily Carr, chapter 5, in Klee Wyck[2]:
- She had a baby slung on her back in a shawl, a girl child clinging to her skirts, and a heavy-faced boy plodding behind her.
- 1974, Homer, The Iliad, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Doubleday, Book Sixteen, p. 377,
- "Patróklos,
- why all the weeping? Like a small girlchild
- who runs beside her mother and cried and cries
- to be taken up, and catches at her gown,
- and will not let her go, looking up in tears
- until she has her wish: that's how you seem,
- Patróklos, winking out your glimmering tears.