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bridesmaid

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈbɹaɪdzˌmeɪd//

A woman who attends a bride during her wedding ceremony, as part of the main wedding party.

noun

  1. 1

    A woman who attends a bride during her wedding ceremony, as part of the main wedding party.

    I'd love to be your bridesmaid at the wedding.

    I was promised sex. Everybody said it. You'll be a bridesmaid, you'll get sex, you'll be fighting 'em off. But not so much as a tongue in sight.

  2. 2

    A person or team that perennially finishes well, but never first.

    He had taken her for a dogsbody, a beta fish, a bridesmaid, a ride-along; he had looked right past her, as likely many people did.

Etymology

From bride + -s- + maid. In the sports and entertainment sense: in reference to the saying always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

verb

  1. 1

    To act as a bridesmaid for; to attend a bride during her wedding ceremony.

    "No, Trichy; I won't be Augusta's bridesmaid; I'll bide my time for bridesmaiding."

    And what's this? that isn't Herbie Frost with you in the canoe ; why he was best man when I bridesmaided Corinne.

    "It's in my Data-fax, right here! December Bride: and I'm supposed to bridesmaid!"

    After ten years of friendship and just six months of lackluster bridesmaiding, the women did not even get an invitation to the wedding.

Forms

plural
bridesmaids
past tense
bridesmaided
past participle
bridesmaided
present participle
bridesmaiding
third person singular
bridesmaids
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).