How to Use wet nurse in a Sentence

wet nurse

noun
  • One is Ina, a blind and aged wet nurse who lived in a cave for decades.
    — New York Times, 13 June 2022
  • For centuries, a wet nurse was the solution of choice for the affluent.
    — Elaine Khosrova, WSJ, 7 May 2018
  • The ancient Greeks strongly believed that a wet nurse should be Greek.
    — Mark Kurlansky, Time, 7 May 2018
  • Slave children could be sold away and slave wet nurses hired out, producing more income for slave owners.
    — NBC News, 13 Aug. 2019
  • This would have been impossible without a wet nurse and a supportive husband.
    — Claire Moran, CNN, 20 Dec. 2022
  • Some slaves, Jones-Rogers could say, were even known to serve as wet nurses, suckling the babes of their white counterparts.
    — Nathan Deuel, Los Angeles Times, 17 Apr. 2020
  • The alpha female not only didn’t shun the beta’s young — with her own pups mostly weaned, Beira pitched in as wet nurse to the new brood.
    — Natalie Angier, New York Times, 3 Aug. 2019
  • The boy’s childhood was spent first with a wet nurse and later at a number of boarding schools in Switzerland and Italy.
    — Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, 10 Oct. 2022
  • Lina and Oviedo are happy with their twins, but Lina is struggling to produce milk, necessitating a wet nurse.
    — Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 26 Oct. 2020
  • Among several biblical references, the pharaoh’s daughter hires a wet nurse to feed baby Moses.
    — David Reamer, Anchorage Daily News, 22 May 2022
  • Many societies had legal codes with various provisions for the comportment of wet nurses.
    — Mark Kurlansky, Time, 7 May 2018
  • Until around 1900, wealthy families could hire a wet nurse, an arrangement that often compromised the health of the nurse’s own infant.
    — Alice Callahan, Smithsonian, 25 Oct. 2019
  • Philippa was a one-time wet nurse who, after a meteoric rise in the royal court, had become something akin to a foster mother to Joanna and Maria.
    — Anne Thériault, Longreads, 3 July 2018
  • Since they were believed to impart their character through their milk, wet nurses had to demonstrate good morals, intelligence, and other desirable attributes.
    — Mark Kurlansky, Time, 7 May 2018
  • His second child—Lucia’s baby, a girl named Ginevra—was removed from her mother’s care, briefly placed in a foundling hospital, and then packed off to a wet nurse in the countryside.
    — Jessica Winter, New Yorker, 11 Nov. 2025
  • In order to seduce a woman, a man must be prepared to go flower-picking with her, to play in her doll house, and, perhaps most essentially, cultivate her closest friend (who, in an ideal society, would be her wet nurse’s daughter).
    — Manu S Pillai, Quartz India, 27 June 2019
  • Teffi focuses on the servants who made such estates possible, especially the nyanya, a recurring figure typically hired first as a wet nurse and then as the general custodian of the children.
    — Sara Wheeler, WSJ, 23 Apr. 2021
  • Stephanie Kresta, a 35-year-old mother of five in Houston, is one of dozens of people who have publicly posted to Facebook offering to wet nurse for other babies, should parents face such dire need.
    — Eleanor Cummins, The New Republic, 26 May 2022
  • The child was whisked off to a wet nurse in the countryside; Montesano married another woman, and Montessori, finding proximity to her ex-lover unbearable, resigned her position at the school.
    — Jessica Winter, The New Yorker, 3 Mar. 2022
  • However, when your organization was founded less than 45 years after slavery was abolished, when Black women were still being forced to be wet nurses to the very children of those who oppressed them and lynching was a common occurrence below the Mason-Dixon Line?
    — Essence, 3 Oct. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'wet nurse.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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