spinster

But she brushed off the barbs, saying: "I am toothy, dumpy, ugly, overweight, a spinster – what the hell."

From BBC ● Jul. 10, 2026

French-American author Lauren Elkin, who writes on art and culture, said a mythology pervaded that she was "this reclusive spinster that never left her house and lived at home with her cat making her paintings".

From BBC ● Feb. 7, 2026

“I’m a geriatric pregnant spinster who puts crystals in her bra,” Helen says in an unusual moment of self-awareness.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 15, 2025

They're living in a rural village together, two spinster women.

From Salon ● Oct. 22, 2023

It was the nasal voice of Miss Grybas, the spinster teacher from school.

From "Between Shades of Gray" by Ruta Sepetys

As her New York Times obituary put it, “She specialized in sourness, or, more politely, acerbity, which she used to her comic advantage in roles as housekeepers, spinsters, wicked stepmothers, nuns and back-talking secretaries.”

From Slate ● Aug. 16, 2019

He would like to see the two take up the approved life of spinsters.

From Washington Post ● Sep. 14, 2018

Considered spinsters back East, both Curtis and Stanley married younger men out West.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 24, 2015

All of this, riveting in itself, underlines the breadth of Austen's experience of life; spinsters in vicarages know more of the human condition at first hand than might be imagined.

From The Guardian ● Feb. 8, 2013

And yet she could see her two daughters, two spinsters beyond the marriageable age; they were at least twenty-five.

From "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan