girlchild

English

Alternative forms

• girl-child, girl child

Etymology

Compound of girl +‎ child.

Noun

girlchild (plural girlchildren)

1. A female child.

   Synonyms: girl, (archaic) woman child, (archaic) maid child; see also Thesaurus:girl

   Antonym: boychild

   • 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, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, The Iliad, 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.

   • 1989 December 17, Terri L. Jewell, “The Power Of Black Women Together”, in Gay Community News, volume 17, number 23, page 13:

     In the final, affirming piece, "They Tell Me...Now I Know," the girlchild narrator begins menstruation, thus undergoing her rite of passage into womanhood.

Translations

a female child

• Hungarian: leánygyermek (hu), leánygyerek