shotgun wedding

English

Etymology

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

Pronunciation

  • Audio (General Australian):(file)

Noun

shotgun wedding (plural shotgun weddings)

  1. (slang, idiomatic) 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. (slang, idiomatic) A wedding which is made in haste or under duress.
  3. (slang, 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.

Translations

See also

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