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

The house we lost was built in 1913 for a spinster heiress named Helen T. Longstreth.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 20, 2025

Without anything being said openly, the fact remained that the daughter had sacrificed her life to care for the mother, and that she had become a spinster for that reason.

From "The House of the Spirits: A Novel" by Isabel Allende

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

It’s a message that doesn’t exactly allay the anxieties the book claims to be militating against—namely that we spinsters aren’t choosing our fates, we’re just losers in the marriage market.

From Slate ● Apr. 9, 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

How could we have guessed as we sat there—two middle-aged spinsters and an old man— that in place of memories were about to be given adventures such as we had never dreamed of?

From "The Hiding Place" by Corrie ten Boom