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Maid
Female domestic worker / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A maid, housemaid, or maidservant is a female domestic worker. In the Victorian era, domestic service was the second-largest category of employment in England and Wales, after agricultural work.[1] In developed Western nations, full-time maids are now typically only found in the wealthiest households. In other parts of the world (mainly within the continent of Asia), maids remain common in urban middle-class households.
![]() | The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the English-speaking world and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. (June 2015) |
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Smedley_maid_illustration_1906.jpg/320px-Smedley_maid_illustration_1906.jpg)
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Maid in Middle English meant an unmarried woman, especially a young one, or specifically a virgin. These meanings lived on in English until recent times (and are still familiar from literature and folk music), alongside the sense of the word as a type of servant.[2][3]
The concept of a maid has developed in anime and sci-fi to encompass social robots and virtual human servants.