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A maidservant is a woman whose job is to work in someone else’s house — cleaning, serving food, looking after rooms. It is an old-fashioned word. English used to mark servants by sex: manservant for a man, maidservant for a woman. Today people are more likely to say maid, , or domestic worker, and maidservant survives mostly in history books, old novels, and fairy tales. It tells you both the work (servant) and that the worker is female (maid). It does not mean a young woman; a maidservant could be any age. In modern English it can also sound stiff, because it puts a person into a class label.
女傭（舊小說裡常寫「女僕」）
組成maid + servant: a female servant. From Middle English maide servant.
同家族的字
- maidthe first half
- servantthe second half
- manservantthe old male counterpart, built the same way
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，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。
maidservantnoun/ˈmeɪdˌsɜː.vənt/
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A female servant; a maid.
- Sixe dayes thou ſhalt labour, and doe all thy worke. / But the ſeuenth day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou ſhalt not doe any worke, thou, nor thy ſonne, nor thy daughter, nor thy man ſeruant, nor thy maid ſeruant, nor thine oxe, nor thine aſſe, nor any of thy cattel, nor thy ſtranger that is within thy gates, that thy man ſeruant and thy maid ſeruant may reſt as well as thou.
- "A great people were they. They conquered till none were left to conquer, and then they dwelt at ease within their rocky mountain walls, with their man servants and their maid servants, their minstrels, their sculptors, and their concubines, and traded and quarrelled, and ate and hunted and slept and made merry till their time came."
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。