union

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Marriage, cohabitation & other relationships
adulteress
affinal
as husband and wifeidiom
be an itemidiom
be shacked upidiom
have an affair
have something going with someoneidiom
hear wedding bellsidiom
hitched
honest
matrimonially
matrimony
monogamist
monogamous
ménage à trois
seven-year itch
shack
shack up
situationship
something

wedlock | American Dictionary

wedlock
noun[ U ]
us/ˈwedˌlɑk/
the state of being married

Examples of wedlock

wedlock
The women whose illegitimate children were boarded out in 1830 -1837 were usually middleaged women with more than one child born out of wedlock.
It is hard to believe that their children were in a more vulnerable position than those born within wedlock.
She was institutionalized for being "immoral," having a child out of wedlock.
On the other hand, this new law signified a new trend of couples cohabiting and children being born out of wedlock.
And they also of course run an enhanced risk of her bringing shame upon them by conceiving children in their house and out of wedlock.
While illegitimacy ratios relate the illegitimate to total births, illegitimacy rates relate births out of wedlock to the unmarried females capable of producing such infants.
Therefore, the presence or absence of official wedlock should not be the criterion on which to treat the two women differently.
Thus, thirty-two of the unwanted children were born out of wedlock as against nine of the control children.
Between 1840 and 1850 there were 993 births outside wedlock in the 24 parishes studied here.
The ratio, or percentage of births which occur out of wedlock, is, however, of considerable comparative interest.
Illegitimacy is taken to be the state or condition of having been born out of wedlock, that is, to parents who are not recognized as married.
Children out of wedlock were most likely raised in single family households or abandoned to the ghastly fate of orphanages or the street.
Legitimacy, its opposite, is the state of having been born within wedlock, having specified rights and obligations.
Levene's study explores the characteristics of children entering the hospital between 1741 and 1760, demonstrating that up to a third were born in wedlock.
Pregnancy outside of wedlock and adultery were practices that would occasion disciplinary action against those involved.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.