Maid

How to spell maid

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce maid

What does maid mean?

1. nounA woman employed to do household cleaning and other domestic work.
2. nounA girl or young unmarried woman, especially in older or literary usage.

Maid in a sentence

• The hotel maid cleaned the room and replaced the towels.

• The old ballad tells of a fair maid who waited by the river.

• They hired a maid to help with the laundry and dusting.

• In the legend, a young maid guarded the sacred well.

Where does maid come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from Old English mægden, meaning a young unmarried woman or girl, which itself was a diminutive of mægeth, the old term for a virgin or maiden. Over time English speakers clipped the longer 'maiden' down to the brisk single syllable 'maid', and both forms have lived side by side ever since. The earliest sense was simply 'a girl' or 'an unmarried woman', and only later did the word narrow to mean a female domestic servant, since such posts were typically filled by unmarried young women. The same Germanic root sits behind the German word Magd, meaning a maidservant, and the dialect word 'may' for a girl. Because 'maid' sounds exactly like 'made' (the past tense of 'make'), the two are a classic spelling trap, even though they share no history at all.

How the word is built

• maid (a shortening of 'maiden', from Old English mægden: a young unmarried woman)

Words that sound like maid

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• made: Past tense and past participle of 'make': created, produced, or caused something to happen.