mésalliance

English

Etymology

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

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /mɛˈzæli.əns/
• IPA^(key): /meɪzəˈlaɪəns/
• Rhymes: dalliance

Noun

mésalliance (plural mésalliances)

1. Marriage with a person of inferior social position.
   • 1840, William Makepeace Thackeray, The Paris Sketchbook, "On the French School of Painting":

     The case is very different in England, where a grocer's daughter would think she made a mésalliance by marrying a painter ...

   • 1848, William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Chapter 6:

     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.

   • 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

• miscellanea

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French

Etymology

From mésalli(er) +‎ -ance.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /me.za.ljɑ̃s/

Noun

mésalliance f (plural mésalliances)

1. misalliance, mésalliance

Further reading

• “mésalliance”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.