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Allin

goodman

nounattested in dialogue

A familiar appellation of civility for a man.

noun

  1. 1

    archaicA familiar appellation of civility for a man.

  2. 2

    historicalA husband; the master of a house or family.

    Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with loves. For the goodman is not at home, he is gone a long journey.

    ‘The gudeman,—he's done with t' paper, and you'll keep it for good and all.’

    The centre of the kitchen was the well-caumed fireside, the saut girnel in the jambs, the goodman's seat between the lowe and the candle, and pussy bawdrons not far from the warmth of the ace.

Etymology

From Middle English godeman, equivalent to good + man.

Forms

plural
goodmen
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).