Brewer's: Xantippe

or Xanthippe (3 syl.). Wife of the philosopher Socrates. Her bad temper has rendered her name proverbial for a conjugal scold.

Be she as foul as was Florentius' love, As old as Sibyl, and as curst and shrewd As Socrates' Xanthippe, or a worse, She moves me not.

Shakespeare:Taming of the Shrew, i 2.

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