dictatrix
nounEtymology From Latin dictātrīx. By surface analysis, dictate + -trix.
1
A female dictator.
- Our principal domestic, in dignity and station, was Mrs Primmins, who was waiting gentlewoman, housekeeper, and tyrannical dictatrix of the whole establishment.1849, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, chapter 3, in The Caxtons, volume 1, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, page 70:
- Prudent mammas were generally of opinion that the height of felicity for a daughter would be the position that should enable her to be the mistress and dictatrix of his ample fortune.1871, Harriet Beecher Stowe, chapter 32, in My Wife and I, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, page 340:
3 more examples
- There is a young lady who is dictatrix—social dictatrix of Countsville. They run wherever she leads them.1937, Caroline Gordon, chapter 11, in The Garden of Adonis, New York: Cooper Square Publishers, published 1971, page 131:
- the face of the distant / Sovereign began to melt and coalesce / With the faces of all women fair and rich: / Movie starlets, heiresses, cruel / Dictatrices, anchorwomen, teen murderesses / Able to sell their tales to Hollywood.1995 January, Thomas M. Disch, “The Lipstick on the Mirror”, in Poetry, page 192:
- My part was Miralda Sumac, a murderous dictatrix who comes to a bad end.2011, Joanna Lumley, Absolutely,, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, page 141:
2
Archaic A dictatorial entity personified as female; that which dictates.
- the Church of Rome which is the great dictatrix of dogmaticall resolutions, and the declarer of Heresy1648, Jeremy Taylor, Treatises […] together with a sermon, London: R. Royston, dedicatory epistle, page 42:
- 1756, George Anderson, A Remonstrance against Lord Bolingbroke’s Philosophical Religion cited in a review in The Monthly Review, Volume 16, 1757, p. 240, […] how can you […] plead a religious conscience as a dictatrix of what is morally good and evil, when you deny God’s moral attributes?