What is a Grass Widow?

Answer 1

one who's husband was run over by a lawnmower

Answer 2

A woman who is divorced or separated from her husband. 2. A woman whose husband is temporarily absent. 3. An abandoned mistress. 4. The mother of a child born out of wedlock.
ETYMOLOGY: Perhaps in allusion to a bed of grass or hay.
WORD HISTORY: The term grass widow cries out for explanation of what grass means and how grass widow came to have its varied though related senses. Grass probably refers to a bed of grass or hay as opposed to a real bed. This association would help explain the earliest recorded sense of the word (1528), “an unmarried woman who has lived with one or more men,” as well as the related senses “an abandoned mistress” and “the mother of an illegitimate child.” Later on, after the sense of grass had been obscured, people may have interpreted grass as equivalent to the figurative use of pasture, as in out to pasture. Hence grass widow could have developed the senses “a divorced or separated wife” or “a wife whose husband is temporarily absent.”

Answer 3

The Grasswidow (or Grass-widow) is a widow whose husband will return in a limited period of time, usually a voyage. The male version is the grasswidower.

Answer 4

"The Grasswidow (or Grass-widow) is a widow whose husband will return in a limited period of time, usually a voyage. The male version is the grasswidower."

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasswidow

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"At a recent gathering I indicated a certain woman was a "grass widow" (meaning a divorcee). No one had heard the expression and doubted its validity. Any info will be passed on to the skeptics.
The expression is certainly valid and quite old. The explanation for it is somewhat more difficult.

The usual current sense of grass widow is 'a woman who is separated, divorced, or lives apart from her husband'. The other sense found in current use is 'a married woman whose husband is frequently apart from her for short periods of time, as on business or to pursue a hobby'.

Historically, there are two senses that are now archaic, obsolete, or dialectal: 'an abandoned mistress' and 'a woman who has borne an illegitimate child'.

We can be rather sure that the first element in the compound is grass (the plant). There have been some other suggestions. But since there are cognate words in other Germanic languages (Swedish, Danish, and Dutch have equivalent words, and German has strohwittwe, literally 'straw widow'), it must be referring to the plant somehow.

The usual suggestion is that grass refers to sleeping--a grass widow is one who is forced to sleep on grass, rather than on a real bed. While this doesn't make much sense for the later 'divorced woman' senses, the earliest sense is 'abandoned mistress', which works well with this interpretation. Some people have suggested that the later senses are based on a figurative interpretation of "out to pasture," which is also somewhat plausible.

Whatever the origin, grass widow has been around for a very long time: the earliest known example is from the early sixteenth century. The main derived expression is grass widower, not surprisingly meaning 'a divorced or separated man' or 'a married man whose wife is frequently apart from him'. "

From: http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19990111

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"[Q] From Maryalice Shaw in the USA: “Where does the term grass widow come from, and why?”

[A] The usual meaning given in British dictionaries is of a woman whose husband is temporarily away, say on business. This sense is known in other English-speaking communities such as Australia. It has long been used in the USA in the rather different sense of “a woman who is separated, divorced, or lives apart from her husband”, as the Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary has it.

Some writers have suggested that it’s actually a corruption of grace-widow. But etymologists are quite sure the first word does refer to the plant, because the phrase has always been recorded with grass and not grace.

Another theory is that it’s slang from the British Raj for wives sent away during the hot summer to the cooler (and greener) hill stations while their husbands remained on duty in the plains. We can trace this theory back to the famous Anglo-Indian dictionary Hobson-Jobson of 1886. It says that the term is applied “with a shade of malignancy”, a tantalisingly opaque comment.

The phrase itself is much older than British India. It’s first used by Sir Thomas More in his Dialogue of 1528. But then it meant something rather different: either an abandoned mistress or an unmarried woman who had cohabited with several men. It might have expressed the idea that the abandoned lover had been “put out to grass”. But it could conceivably have come from the same type of origin as bastard; this is from the Latin bastum for a pack saddle, suggesting a child born after a brief encounter on an improvised bed, such as a packsaddle pillow, whose owner had gone by morning. Could the grass in grass widow refer to surreptitious love-making in the fields rather than indoors, or the straw in a barn used for an illicit tryst?

Our modern meaning first turns up in the 1840s. It seems possible that the term was applied derisively to Anglo-Indian wives sent away for the summer (were there perhaps well-known opportunities for hanky-panky in the hill stations?) and that it only gradually took on the modern sense through a reinterpretation of grass to mean the green landscape of the hills. That could explain the “shade of malignancy” comment in Hobson-Jobson, though it says tactfully about the older senses of the word that “no such opprobrious meanings attach to the Indian use”.

FROM: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-gra1.htm

Answer 5

Someone whose husband spends all his spare time on the golf course.

Answer 6

Someone who was married to a police informer perhaps ?

Answer 7

i'd have thought a woman whose hubby leaves her all the time to watch/play some kind of sport....eg...football or golf


just my idea!!!

Answer 8

a green hinted glass

Answer 9

http://www.grasswidow.com

Answer 10

a really good bag of weed????