seminary
Among the several definitions of seminary in the OED is the following:
4. A place of education, school, college, university, or the like; often explicitly ... seminary of learning, science, etc. Also in more specific sense ... an institution for the training of those destined for some particular profession.
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In the earlier half of the 19th c. 'Seminary for Young Ladies' was very common as the designation of a private school for girls. This use is perhaps not wholly obsolete, but is no longer in repute.
A "Seminary for Young Ladies," or possibly a "Ladies's Seminary," then, might bear the same relationship to Gilbert's audience as the schools in the 1950s bear to us today. We would associate them with ideas from the fifties about education, child-raising, gender identities and roles, and so on.
The word seminary appears to be from an earlier word for a place where something, like a kind of plant or flower, is "developed or cultivated."
This discussion is based on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which requires a little explanation.
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Last update: 12 April 1998.