How to Use handmaiden in a Sentence

handmaiden

noun
  • Pedrad will land the role of Mara, the handmaiden and friend to Jasmine.
    Borys Kit, The Hollywood Reporter, 4 Aug. 2017
  • Same thing, just the handmaiden to Facebook kind of thing.
    Eric Johnson, Recode, 3 Dec. 2018
  • Kim Staunton is the smartest woman in the room as Olivia’s handmaiden and Sir Toby’s paramour.
    Lisa Kennedy, The Know, 30 Nov. 2019
  • No politician wants to risk getting tagged as a handmaiden to big banks.
    Tory Newmyer, Washington Post, 16 June 2017
  • In Episode 1, the viewer first meets Janine, who scoffs when the Aunts explain the handmaidens' new purpose.
    Julie Kosin, Harper's BAZAAR, 27 Apr. 2017
  • But after dinner, Talya, a handmaiden to Queen Alicent, meets with her in the cloak of night.
    Erica Gonzales, ELLE, 10 Oct. 2022
  • Nasim Pedrad: plays Dalia, the handmaiden to Princess Jasmine.
    Sydney Odman, The Hollywood Reporter, 5 July 2018
  • On many of them, recognizable iconography appeared: the cloak of the handmaiden, the wire of the hanger.
    Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker, 8 July 2022
  • Anti-Corbyn die-hards, on the other hand, have been branded the handmaidens of a hard Brexit.
    Benjamin Mueller, New York Times, 21 Nov. 2019
  • Here comes Judith accompanied by her handmaiden, with the head of Holofernes in tow.
    Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 20 Dec. 2021
  • This, of course, begs the question if Catherine really did have a handmaiden who helped her seize power.
    Rachel Paige, refinery29.com, 5 Jan. 2021
  • Why add competition or its handmaiden, guilt, to the hefty mental weight of survival?
    Soleil Ho, SFChronicle.com, 18 May 2020
  • Why did Vitali walk away from acting and devote himself to the thankless role of artistic handmaiden?
    Ty Burr, BostonGlobe.com, 23 May 2018
  • After making the special delivery to the devil's handmaiden, Ben’s fate doesn’t look good.
    Tamara Fuentes, Seventeen, 29 Oct. 2018
  • My mother went with them and spent the week threading leis, ironing pa‘u, and generally acting as a kind of hula handmaiden.
    Hanya Yanagihara, Condé Nast Traveler, 12 Jan. 2017
  • Some of these loan finance projects are an example of the Chinese state almost serving as a handmaiden to its companies.
    CBS News, 2 Nov. 2022
  • The movie knows a thing that is, apparently, rather difficult to say: that the system of higher learning in the United States is not just an adjunct to the class system or handmaiden of it.
    Troy Patterson, The New Yorker, 10 Oct. 2019
  • An important one is rethinking the role the U.S. has played as the handmaiden in Beijing’s decades-long global isolation of Taiwan.
    Therese Shaheen, National Review, 11 Sep. 2019
  • What would the United States be like if the civil service were to become a mere handmaiden to an unscrupulous chief executive?
    Jason Linkins, The New Republic, 23 Sep. 2022
  • But at the same time, there seems to be little reckoning with the genre’s deep roots in this very system of inequality—little acknowledgment that the art is the handmaiden of the system.
    Robert Jackson Wood, The New Republic, 10 Dec. 2020
  • Kit Harington is a handsome man, or as Daenerys's former handmaiden Doreah would put it, it is known.
    Eliza Thompson, Cosmopolitan, 24 July 2017
  • But this bit of craft wisdom—conflict is king—is the handmaiden of a paranoid anthropology, and a limited way of thinking about action and speech.
    Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 2 May 2022
  • That premise has served science and its handmaiden, technology, extremely well over the past few centuries.
    Christof Koch, Scientific American, 19 May 2020
  • Bolton is best known for making counterproliferation the handmaiden of war and regime change.
    James Griffiths, CNN, 23 Mar. 2018
  • Henceforth, rather than military power serving as the handmaiden of diplomacy, the reverse would be true.
    David Rohde, New York Times, 15 Apr. 2016
  • And alongside him, Mary Magdalene is a heartsick handmaiden.
    David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 2 Apr. 2018
  • The Washington Post on Tuesday published a story alleging that Barrett, who does not advertise her membership in the group, was at least, at one time, a handmaiden.
    Nicholas Rowan, Washington Examiner, 7 Oct. 2020
  • Ignore #FakeNews and it’s handmaidens of stupid outrage.
    Derrick Bryson Taylor, BostonGlobe.com, 7 Sep. 2019
  • His aides and friends and diplomatic partners are handmaidens and babysitters and kindergarten teachers and ventriloquists.
    Katy Waldman, Slate Magazine, 18 May 2017
  • The upper level is faulted for admitting too much light and its inevitable handmaiden shadow; the lower for admitting too little.
    Anthony Paletta, WSJ, 14 Jan. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'handmaiden.' 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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