wet-nurse

Questions about wet-nurse

What does wet-nurse mean?

wet-nurse means "a woman hired to suckle a child of someone else". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in wet-nurse?

wet-nurse has 2 syllables and divides as wet--nurse under the regular spelling rules. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for wet-nurse?

Close synonyms include wet nurse, wetnurse, amah, breastfeed, suckle. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is wet-nurse a common word?

wet-nurse is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.