dame [ME] In its earliest use dame meant ‘a female ruler’. It comes ultimately from Latin domina ‘mistress’, the root of which also gave us *danger, domination [ME], dominion [ME], and *dungeon. Dame was used as a form of address to a woman of rank from the Middle Ages, and in the 17th century became a legal title—it is now the title given to a woman with the rank of Knight Commander or holder of the Grand Cross in the orders of chivalry. Alongside this elevated use ran a more popular strand, where a dame was the mistress of a house or school, or any elderly or mature woman. This gave us the pantomime dame, the comic middle-aged character usually played by a man, who makes her first appearance in print in the early 20th century. Dame is used in the USA for any girl or woman—as Oscar Hammerstein II told us in his 1949 song from the musical South Pacific, ‘There is nothin’ like a dame’. Dam [ME] in the sense ‘mother (of an animal)’ is also from dame (the sense ‘a barrier’ [ME] is Germanic). See also baby, damsel.