- 1交際花（舊時往來權貴的女子；不是口語裡罵人的「妓女」）
In the past, a courtesan was a woman who spent time with rich or important men and was paid for it — for company, for talk, for being seen with them, and for sex. She was not a wife. Writers often drew a line between a courtesan and a woman who sold sex in the street: the courtesan was dressed for palaces, sometimes famous, and close to a court. That is why the word sits next to . You will meet it in history books, novels, and films about earlier centuries. It is not an everyday word now, and it is not a kind name to put on a living person. Though actually the tidy picture (“high-class”) is tidier than real lives were; money and danger still sat in the middle of it.
組成Borrowed from Middle French courtisane, from Italian cortigiana, the woman’s form of cortigiano (“courtier”), from corte (“court”), from Latin cohors. In origin, a woman of the court.
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
courtesannoun/kɔːtɪˈzæn/
- 1
A female prostitute, especially one with high-status or wealthy clients.
- What wine, what drug, what philtre known of man / Will drown this ancient foe, / Ruthless and ravenous as a courtesan, / Sure as an ant, and slow?
- In the notes he wrote for Nana, his novel about a courtesan in Second Empire Paris, Zola imagined ‘a whole society hurling itself’ at her body, ‘a pack of hounds after a bitch, who is not even on heat and makes fun of the hounds following her’. This might also describe the life of Harriette Wilson, whose unguarded pursuit by the leaders of the British aristocracy, the army, the government and opposition made her the most desired, and then the most dangerous, woman in Regency London.
- 2
datedThe mistress of a royal or noble.
- 3
archaicA woman of a royal or noble court.
- 4
board-gameschessgamesA fairy chess piece that can move to any adjacent square, that, when captured, the capturing piece is also eliminated.
- The courtesan moves like a mann, but whatever piece captures her is also removed from the board (unless it’s a king).
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。