cuckold
/ˈkʌk(ə)ld
/noun dated
The husband of an adulteress, often regarded as an object of derision: jokes in literature about elderly cuckolds and misers are rife...
- Alienation of affection was once a salve to the broken hearts and bruised pride of cuckolds across the nation, but the claim began losing favor in the early 1900s.
- The disaffected mugger and the enraged cuckold were despised as lowbrows; the true craftsmen of murder inaugurated ever more elaborate schemes.
- She had taken his trust and made a cuckold out of him.
verb [with object]
1(Of a man) make (another man) a cuckold by having a sexual relationship with his wife: in the novel Humberto cuckolds his employer...
- Heathcliff goes on to torment Edgar by hinting that he has cuckolded him.
- In the film, he was cuckolded by his father, played by Laurence Olivier.
- ‘I began to respond,’ writes Tynan, ‘and then suddenly thought how impossible it would be to cuckold a man I venerated under his own roof.’
1.1(Of a man’s wife) make (her husband) a cuckold: he was repeatedly cuckolded by his wife Aphrodite...
- As you see, this is no simple story about a man who is cuckolded by his wife, but the story of man who chooses not to know what it is too painful for him to accept.
- He is cuckolded by his wife, Alison, and injured after falling down from the roof in a tub.
- Rand cuckolded her do-nothing spouse in front of his face and with long, tedious rationalizations with which she forced him to agree.
Derivatives
cuckoldry
- Our objective was to compare rates of cuckoldry of males that settled and bred earlier than, or simultaneously with, all adjacent neighbors.
- Othello tells Iago of his rage, and plans to avenge his supposed cuckoldry.
- But what really astonished us was to find cuckoldry in a situation where males have evolved to perform all of the parental care.
Origin
Late Old English, from Old French cucuault, from cucu 'cuckoo' (from the cuckoo's habit of laying its egg in another bird's nest). The equivalent words in French and other languages applied to both the bird and the adulterer; cuckold has never been applied to the bird in English.