wedlock

English[edit]

From Middle English wedlok, wedlocke (“wedlock, marriage, matrimony”), from Old English wedlāc (“marriage vow, pledge, plighted troth, wedlock”); synchronically analyzable as wed +‎ -lock.

wedlock (countable and uncountable, plural wedlocks)

The state of being married.
Synonyms: matrimony, marriage
(obsolete) A wife; a married woman.
- 1601, Ben Jonson, The Poetaster:
  Which of these is thy Wedlock, Menelaus? thy Hellen? thy Lucrece? that we may do her Honour; mad Boy?
- 1643, John Milton, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce:
  What is it then but that desire which God put into Adam in Paradise before he knew the sin of incontinence; that desire which God saw it was not good that man should be left alone to burn in; the desire and longing to put off an unkindly solitarines by uniting another body, but not without a fit soule to his in the cheerfull society of wedlock.

state of being married — see marriage,‎ matrimony

married woman — see wife