foundress
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: derivation
Topics: biology
natural-sciences
zoology
Etymology: From Middle English founderess, founderesse, foundress (“female founder or builder of a city; female founder or benefactor of a religious house; (figuratively) female inventor or originator; (figuratively) a source”) [and other forms]; from founder, foundere, foundour (“founder or builder of a building, city, country, etc.; builder or endower of a church, college, monastery, etc.; benefactor or patron of such an institution; charter member of a guild; first head of a religious organization; inventor, originator; (figuratively) earliest of a class of people; (figuratively) a source”) + -esse (“suffix forming female forms of words”). Foundour is derived from Anglo-Norman fundur, Old French fondeor, fondeur (“creator, instigator, founder”) (modern French fondeur), from Latin fundātor (“founder”) (rare), from fundō (“to make by smelting, found”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰewd- (“to pour”)) + -tor (suffix forming masculine agent nouns). The English word is analysable as founder + -ess (suffix forming female forms of words).
Base: founder
Affixes: -ess
Inflected forms:
form: foundresses
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: founderess
pos: noun
tags: alternative
Senses:
gloss: A female founder (“one who founds or establishes”).
pos: noun
tags: dated
examples: But whether he departed without the French kings conſent or diſaſſent, he deceiued in his expectacion, and in maner in diſpaire, retourned againe to the Lady Margaret his firſt fooliſh foundreſſe.
Forgetfull of himſelfe, his bearth, his Country, friends, and all, / And onely minding (vvhom he miſt) the Foundreſſe of his thrall.
He humbly louted in meeke lovvlineſſe, / And ſeemely vvelcome for her did prepare: / For of their order ſhe vvas Patroneſſe, / Albe Chariſſa vvere their chiefeſt foundereſſe.
This VVoman conceiving there vvas not already Sects enough amongſt Chriſtians, had it in her Head to make another. And moreover, Perſons of her Sex having not been accuſtomed to be Foundreſſes of Religions, ſhe thought that hers vvould make her conſiderable in the VVorld by the ſingularity of its Original.
For zeal like her's her ſervants vvere too ſlovv; / She vvas the firſt, vvhere need requir'd, to go; / Herſelf the foundreſs and attendant too.
[I]f he had been acquainted vvith the names of the many foundreſſes and benefactreſſes in our tvvo univerſities, he vvould not have advanced ſo great an untruth.
[I]n death repose, / For her, the founderess of the shrine, / That holocaust to wrath divine, / Not only error to atone, / But grateful homage for a throne!— […]
She [Anne Geneviève de Bourbon] was one of the early founderesses of those literary gatherings which attained such renown in the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and lavished her bounties freely among a crew of poetasters, whom she naïvely thought sublime.
Miss Sellon, the foundress of English sisterhoods, adopted and brought up in her convent at Devonport a little Irish waif who had been made an orphan by the outbreak of cholera in 1849.
Saint Brigid is one of the great figures in the epoch immediately succeeding the first coming of the Word. She was the foundress of a school of religious teaching for women at Kildare, or Killdara, "The Church of the Oak-woods," whose name still records her work.
The method of healing of Jesus Christ and that of the foundress of Christian Science [Mary Baker Eddy] are not one and the same method, although called by the name of faith they appear at first sight to the unwary to be identical.
Where is our highly honourworthy salutable spouse-founderess?
Their doctrines are eclectic and simple and, unlike the ministers of established schools, the founders (or more frequently the founderesses) make claim to unusual spiritual power in divination, sorcery, and faith healing.
Francis [of Assisi]'s own unlovely tunic, and that of his female colleague Clare, foundress of parallel communities for women, are lovingly preserved and displayed by the nuns of St Clare in Assisi, so amid the stateliness and beauty of Clare's thirteenth-century basilica, there is a perpetual reminder of what it means to live like the destitute.
gloss: A female animal which establishes a colony.
pos: noun
tags: specifically
examples: [T]he comparison of multiple inseminations and multiple foundress associations showed that the number of foundresses, a component of migration structure, affects the potential for social evolution more strongly than the number of inseminations per foundress, a component of the mating structure.
When two [European paper wasp] foundresses meet at the nest site after hibernation, the foundress with the higher corpus allatum activity usually becomes dominant.
Like many vertebrate cooperative breeders, foundress associations of paper wasps are composed of individuals of varying relatedness (typically full sisters, cousins, and unrelated individuals;[…]), […] However there is also very clear helping behaviour: subordinate foundresses hunt for caterpillars and other insect food to provision the offspring of the dominant female.
Derived words: refoundress
Translations: