Why this word is great
BELDAME — [Noun] An old woman, especially one considered ugly, malevolent, or witch-like, or, archaically, a grandmother. From late Middle English *beldame*, from *bel* ("fine, beautiful," from Old French *bel*, from Latin *bellus*) + *dame* ("lady, mother," from Old French, from Latin *domina*, "mistress, lady"), an etymological courtesy time has curdled into its opposite. Unlike *crone*, which implies a withered, merely disagreeable antiquity, or *matriarch*, which denotes a figure of respected authority, a beldame is an archaic vessel for malevolence, a whispered archetype that turns kinship into a curse. She is the shape at the edge of the village woods, the gnarled hand clutching a tattered shawl, the one-eyed face at the window just as the storm breaks—a figure carved from our oldest fears of the feminine grown old and strange, giving fear a familiar, and therefore more terrifying, shape.