Gretna Green

English

Etymology

"Green at the gravelly hill", from Old English greot (“grit”) (in the dative form greoten) and hoh (“hill”).

Proper noun

Gretna Green

1. A village on the border between England and Scotland (in Dumfries and Galloway council area just inside Scotland), famous for easy marriages (OS grid ref NY3168).
   • 1845, Leigh Hunt, The Indicator: a Miscellany for the Fields and the Fireside (page 213)

     The Clown is a London cockney, with a prodigious eye to his own comfort and muffins,—a Lord Mayor's fool, who loved "everything that was good;" and Columbine is the boarding-school girl, ripe for running away with, and making a dance of it all the way from Chelsea to Gretna Green.

Noun

Gretna Green (plural Gretna Greens)

1. Any town with liberal marriage laws, a place where couples elope.
   • 1823 June 12, Lord Redesdale, “Dissenters' marriages”, in parliamentary debates (British House of Lords), page 16:

     It was nothing more nor less than to convert all places licensed under the Toleration Act into Gretna Greens, where persons of all persuasions might go and make irregular marriages.

   • Federal Writers Project (1952) West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State, →ISBN, page 485: “A town of narrow streets and smoke-begrimed old buildings, Wellsburg thrived as a Gretna Green for many years”
   • 1995, Suzanne Poirier, Chicago's War on Syphilis, 1937-40, →ISBN:

     The sexual irresponsibility attributed to most gin marriages could not help being linked with the possibility of a sexually transmitted infection that accompanied the couples, untested, to Crown Point, Valparaiso, or other Gretna Greens.

Adjective

Gretna Green (not comparable)

1. carried out quickly and secretively in a jurisdiction that is not the bride or groom's own. (of a marriage)
   • 1833, R. Longley, private correspondence quoted in Peter Ward, Courtship, Love, and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century English Canada, page 110:

     There has been a Gretna Green marriage in Brockville. Miss Mary Ann Hall and a Mr. Underwood ran away to Ogdensburg (New York) and got married last week and was back again the night before last.

   • 1836 August, 'Orson', "East Florida—Alligators—the Seminoles, etc.", The Knickerbocker Magazine, page 150:

     He made a very pleasant morning's sport, especially as it was my first conquest, and entitled me to all the privileges of a Floridian. At this my favorite place of resort, a Gretna-Green affair happened, just before my arrival, and was witnessed by a companion who was often with me

   • 1861, "Three Months in Labrador", Harper's New Monthly Magazine, volume 22, page 757:

     Just beyond the portal is a cluster of islands, one of them, Gull Island, made famous by a Gretna Green affair of tragic end

Related terms

• elopement
• shotgun wedding