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mésalliance

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
See also: mesalliance

English

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Etymology

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Borrowed from French mésalliance, from mésallier (to misally).

Pronunciation

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Noun

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mésalliance (plural mésalliances)

  1. Marriage with a person of inferior social position.
    • 1840, M. A. Titmarsh [pseudonym; William Makepeace Thackeray], “On the French School of Painting”, in The Paris Sketch Book, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: John Macrone, [], →OCLC:
      The case is very different in England, where a grocer's daughter would think she made a mésalliance by marrying a painter []
    • 1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 6, in Vanity Fair [], London: Bradbury and Evans [], published 1848, →OCLC:
      He had been revolving in his mind the marriage question pending between Jos and Rebecca, and was not over well pleased that a member of a family into which he, George Osborne, of the —th, was going to marry, should make a mésalliance with a little nobody–a little upstart governess.
    • 1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (published anonymously), The Coming Race[1], Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, page 272:
      But this is too sanguine a belief. Instances of such mésalliance would be as rare as those of intermarriage between the Anglo-Saxon emigrants and the Red Indians.
    • 1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter XXXVII, in Middlemarch [], volume II, Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book IV, page 260:
      It was an abominable thing that my grandmother should have been disinherited because she made what they called a mésalliance, though there was nothing to be said against her husband except that he was a Polish refugee who gave lessons for his bread.
    • 1907, Ambrose Bierce, Beyond the Walls:
      To a mésalliance of that kind every globule of my ancestral blood spoke in opposition.
    • 1941, Aylmer and Louise Maude translation of Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace:
      But if you marry the old count you will make his last days happy, and as widow of the Grand...the prince would no longer be making a mésalliance by marrying you.

Anagrams

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French

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Etymology

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From mésalli(er) +‎ -ance.

Pronunciation

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  • IPA(key): /me.za.ljɑ̃s/
  • Audio:(file)

Noun

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mésalliance f (plural mésalliances)

  1. misalliance, mésalliance

Further reading

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