English

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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From preceptor +‎ -ess.

Noun

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preceptress (plural preceptresses)

  1. (now rare) A female preceptor, or provider of moral instruction; a teacher. [from 18th c.]
    • 1790, Jane Austen, “Jack and Alice”, in Juvenilia:
      ‘I daily became more amiable, and might perhaps by this time have nearly attained perfection, had not my Preceptoress been torn from my arms, e'er I had attained by seventeenth year.’
    • 1852, James Fenimore Cooper, Precaution[1]:
      Her preceptress had never found it necessary to repeat an admonition of any kind, since her arrival at years to discriminate between the right and the wrong.
    • 1889, Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn[2]:
      She was my sister, my preceptress and friend; but she died--her end was violent, untimely, and criminal!
    • 1896, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Madelon[3]:
      She had married late in life, having been previously a preceptress in a young ladies' school.