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-ine2

Forming feminine nouns.

French, via Latin ‑ina from Greek ‑inē, or from German ‑in.

The only common example is heroine; chatelaine (French, feminine of châtelain, the governor of a castle) is a woman in charge of a large house, margravine is a historical term for the wife of a margrave, the hereditary title of some princes of the Holy Roman Empire; chorine, a chorus girl, was formed from chorus. It is possible that the humorous name for the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, leaderene, was influenced by this ending, even though the spelling derives from female names ending in ‑ene. See also ‑een, ‑ina, and ‑ino.

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