NURSE • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Nurse

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noun

Nurse n.

1.

One who nourishes; a person who supplies food, tends, or brings up; as:

(a)

A woman who has the care of young children; especially, one who suckles an infant not her own.

(b)

A person, especially a woman, who has the care of the sick or infirm.

2.

One who, or that which, brings up, rears, causes to grow, trains, fosters, or the like. "The nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise."

3.

(Naut.) A lieutenant or first officer, who is the real commander when the captain is unfit for his place.

4.

(Zool.)

(a)

A peculiar larva of certain trematodes which produces cercariae by asexual reproduction. See Cercaria, and Redia.

(b)

Either one of the nurse sharks.

Nurse shark. (Zool.)

(a)

A large arctic shark (Somniosus microcephalus), having small teeth and feeble jaws; called also sleeper shark, and ground shark.

(b)

A large shark (Ginglymostoma cirratum), native of the West Indies and Gulf of Mexico, having the dorsal fins situated behind the ventral fins.

To put to nurse, or To put out to nurse, to send away to be nursed; to place in the care of a nurse.

Wet nurse, Dry nurse. See Wet nurse, and Dry nurse, in the Vocabulary.

verb

Nurse v. t. (past & past part. nursed; pres. part. nursing)

1.

To nourish; to cherish; to foster; as:

(a)

To nourish at the breast; to suckle; to feed and tend, as an infant.

(b)

To take care of or tend, as a sick person or an invalid; to attend upon. "Sons wont to nurse their parents in old age." "Him in Egerian groves Aricia bore, And nursed his youth along the marshy shore."

2.

To bring up; to raise, by care, from a weak or invalid condition; to foster; to cherish; applied to plants, animals, and to any object that needs, or thrives by, attention. "To nurse the saplings tall." "By what hands (has vice) been nursed into so uncontrolled a dominion?"

3.

To manage with care and economy, with a view to increase; as, to nurse our national resources.

4.

To caress; to fondle, as a nurse does.

To nurse billiard balls, to strike them gently and so as to keep them in good position during a series of caroms.

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Etymology of 'Nurse'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Nurse" Quotes from Famous Books

... husband's sloop. He had gone with the first light wind, and there was enough to bring him home, although with heavy sail. She forgot the muttering negroes and the sickness below. Her servants had been instructed to nurse and nourish where assistance was needed, and up here there was nothing to do but wander with her friend and child through the gay beauty of the terraced garden, or climb the stone steps to the cold ...

— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... seen right into hell. The first dressings are removed by the doctors—sometimes there is only a lump of cotton-wool to fill up a hole—and the men lie there with their tragic eyes fixed upon one. All day a nurse has sat by a man who has been shot through the lungs. Each breath is painful; it does not bear writing about. The pity of it all just breaks one's heart. But I suppose we do not see nearly the worst of ...

— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan

... mountain trails, accustomed to riding anything from a half-broken cayuse to a wabbly platform at a rope's end, the day's journey nowadays limited itself to being lifted out of bed in the arms of his lusty nurse, being placed with all discretion in the exact middle of a couch and in being trundled slowly across the floor to the bay window. Later in the day, the process repeated itself in the reverse direction, but with even greater care because of the fatiguing experiences of the day. ...

— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... summer; but as late as October he fell a victim to yellow fever. He had sent most of his surplus funds home, and his widow soon exhausted her scanty supply of money. Instead of applying to the American consul, she went to live with an English family as a nurse. But there she was taken sick herself, and was sent away from her comfortable home to a boarding-house, lest she should communicate some contagious disease to her employer's family. Here she had contracted a debt which she could ...

— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic

... the direction in which his downward path was tending. It was an honest little cough enough, so far as appearances went. But coughs are ungrateful things. You find one out in the cold, take it up and nurse it and make everything of it, dress it up warm, give it all sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry it round in your bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog. And by-and-by its little bark grows sharp and savage, and—confound the thing!—you find it is a wolf's whelp that ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various

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