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Womankind means all women, thought of together as one large group — women as a whole part of the human race, not the women in one room or one family. You meet it in big, serious statements: "a great day for womankind", "his contempt for womankind". It is a formal, rather literary, old-sounding word. Nobody says it in ordinary conversation; it belongs to speeches, poems, and writing that wants to sound grand. It has no plural and takes a singular verb. It was built to stand beside mankind (all people) and its partner word , and it usually appears where a writer wants that wide, sweeping feeling. Because mankind itself now sounds unfair to many people — humankind is the modern replacement — womankind can feel like a word from another century too, though a writer may still choose it on purpose for exactly that old flavour.
女性(全體)、婦女界;泛指所有女人
組成woman + -kind. Here -kind does not mean "friendly". It is the old word kind meaning "type, sort, race", so womankind is literally "the woman sort of people". From Middle English wommankynde.
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。
womankindnoun
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Women, taken collectively.
- The infinite simplicity and silliness of mankind and womankind at large were too well known to the Serjeant to cause him dismay, let them be shown in ever so egregious a fashion.
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。