Other forms: spinsters
A spinster is an older woman who has never married. A maiden aunt or spinster, the parish spinster, called a spinster.
It is dated and now insulting, since it carries pity and failure with it, and there is no equivalent word for a man that carries anything of the kind. It survived in English marriage law as a legal description until 2005.
1nounspinsterAn older woman who has never married.
“In the old novel, the spinster aunt lived alone and knew all the village gossip.”
spinster is an old term.
Middle English spinnestere meant a woman who spins, since spinning was work an unmarried woman did.
Middle English
spynnestere — woman who spins fibre
English, today
spinster
From Middle English spynnestere (“woman who spins fibre”), from c. 1350; equivalent to spin + ster. The semantic development is from a historical notion of unmarried women spinning thread for a living.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA