Empty-nest
noun
1.
a household in which one or more parents live after the children have left home:
Our only child just moved into her first apartment, so we have an empty nest.
2.
a stage in a parent’s life after the children have left home.
The stage in a family’s cycle when the children have grown up and left home to begin their own adult lives.
Note: For parents, the empty nest sometimes results in midlife anxiety.
The home of parents whose children have grown up and moved out. For example, Now that they had an empty nest, Jim and Jane opened a bed-and-breakfast. This expression, alluding to a nest from which baby birds have flown, gave rise to such related ones as empty-nester, for a parent whose children had moved out, and empty-nest syndrome, for the state of mind of parents whose children had left. [ c. 1970 ]
Read Also:
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noun 1. a parent whose children have reached adulthood and left home. noun 1. (informal) a married person whose children have grown up and left home noun a person whose children have grown and left home; also written empty nester noun See empty-nester noun A person whose children have grown up and moved away from […]
- Empty-nest syndrome
noun 1. a depressed state felt by some parents after their children have left home. noun 1. (informal) a condition, often involving depression, loneliness, etc, experienced by parents living in a home from which the children have grown up and left
- Empty-quarter
noun 1. . [Arabic roo b ahl khah-lee; English roo b al kah-lee] /Arabic ˌrʊb ɑl ˈxɑ li; English ˌrʊb æl ˈkɑ li/ noun 1. a desert in S Arabia, N of Hadhramaut and extending from Yemen to Oman. About 250,000 sq. mi. (647,500 sq. km). noun 1. another name for Rub` al Khali
- Empty set
empty set (ěmp’tē) Mathematics The set that has no members or elements.
- Empty-word
noun 1. (especially in Chinese grammar) a word or morpheme that has no lexical meaning and that functions as a grammatical link or marker, rather than as a contentive.