broodmare

[Mark Mandel]

Neither OED nor M-W has the figurative sense of "broodmare" as 'a woman
regarded chiefly or solely as a producer of children'. I'm familiar with
this usage, though I can't give citations for it, and a Google search is
swamped with literal uses. Can anyone else provide a cite?

What prompts my mention of this is the appearance of this sense in a
Wikipedia article (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characters_in_World_War_Z#Characters), with a
link to an article that has only the literal sense.

--
Mark Mandel

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org