maid

   In modern English maid refers to a female servant, but ‘maid’ would not normally be used as a professional title. In Shakespeare’s time ‘maid’ was far more often used in its general sense of a young, unmarried girl, a virgin. Girls in the Shakespeare plays are thus frequently addressed as: maid, fair maid, good maid, dear maid, kind maid, sweet maid. Occasionally ‘maiden’, the fuller form of the word, occurs. Thus in All’s Well That Ends Well (2:i) the King says to Helena: ‘We thank you, maiden!’ A few lines later he says: ‘Fare thee well, kind maid.’ This general use of maid survived in some English dialects. ‘My good maid’ is addressed to a girl in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, for example. In The Dream of Fair Women, by Henry Williamson, a Devonshire man says to his wife: ‘Now, don’t ‘ee fret ‘eeself, my maid.’ The novel was published in 1919, but the expression might still be heard in the West Country. Seven Little Australians, by Ethel Turner, a children’s story published in 1894, has a male visitor calling a ten-year-old girl ‘my little maid’.