stiction

Pronounced: STICK-shun, noun

Notes: I’ve used and heard this word, but I always thought we just made it up; I had no idea it was a real word

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Yesterday’s word

The word distaff means “maternal; female”

First usage

Our word came into English before 1000

Background / Comments

I ran across this word somewhere in the Lord Peter Wimsey stories by Dorothy Sayers – probably in more than one book. I actually took the time to look up the word. If I remember correctly, it is used in those books (perhaps just “book”) very much in the sense that we use the word “maternal”: something like So-and-so is related to X on the distaff side. Originally a distaff was a short staff that held fibers of flax or wool that would be spun into yard or a thread. Such spinning was typically done by women in those days, and thus our word became symbolic for the work or domain of women, and, over time, to refer to the female side of a family.