Where Daughter and Widow are Hidden?

The article examines meanings of nouns relating to female persons
that were in use in 19th and 20th centuries and are still encountered nowadays but are rarely included in dictionaries.
 Female derivatives that were in use in 19th century and earlier are usually
supplied with the meaning ‘wife of the person indicated by the producing
word’, e.g. general’sha — ‘general’s wife’, doktorsha — ‘doctor’s wife’, even
though widows of generals, majors and marshals of nobility were still called
general’sha, mayorsha and predvoditel’sha.
 In colloquial speech and literary language the meaning ‘widow’ did not
neces sary apply widows of offi cials.
 The authors investigated usages of soldatka (‘soldier’s wife or widow’) and
uncovered ideological motives that explain the presence of the meaning
‘widow’ in explanatory dictionaries.
 The meaning ‘daughter’ is often combined with the meaning ‘wife’ when we
look at nouns that relate to female persons. However, in Russian dictiona ries
(only in the Great Academic Dictionary and the Small Academic Dictionary)
such a combination is recorded only for words baronessa [baroness], grafi nya
[countess], gertsoginya [duchess] and, somewhat unexpectedly, mel’nichikha
(‘miller’s daughter or wife’).
 This work represents a fragment of the general problem of how words and
their meanings should be refl ected in dictionaries — both in colloquial
speech and literary language.