shotgun wedding

English

Etymology

From the implication that the groom was forced to the altar by shotgun-wielding relatives of the bride.

Pronunciation

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

Noun

shotgun wedding (plural shotgun weddings)

1. (idiomatic, slang) A wedding in which the bride is already pregnant.
   • 2012, Charles W. Dunn, American Culture in Peril, University Press of Kentucky, →ISBN, page 48:

     If Red Skelton's joke can still elicit laughs, it is only because there is a minority who can still remember a shotgun wedding and even recall the understandings that lay behind that insistence, now seeming quaint, that a couple sleeping together should really be married.

2. (idiomatic) Any similarly reputedly forced partnership, between people, organizations, components, or concepts.
   • 2021, Michio Kaku, The God Equation:

     But all this fails when we try to have a shotgun wedding between the two great theories of nature, relativity and quantum theory.

Related terms

• shotgun marriage

Translations

wedding in which the bride is pregnant

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 奉子成婚 (zh) (fèngzǐ chénghūn)

• Dutch: moetje (nl) n
• Finnish: haulikkohäät pl
• French: mariage précipité m
• German: Mussehe f, Mussheirat f, Musshochzeit f; (more often expressed verbally:) sie mussten heiraten
• Irish: pósadh práinne m
• Italian: matrimonio riparatore m
• Japanese: できちゃった結婚 (dekichatta kekkon), でき婚 (dekikon)
• Korean: 속도위반 결혼 (sokdowiban gyeolhon)
• Serbo-Croatian: vjenčanje sačmaricom n, venčanje sačmaricom n, morala se udati (more often expressed verbally)
• Spanish: penalti (es) m, casarse de penalti m
• Welsh: priodas glec f, priodas orfod f

See also

• white wedding