child bride

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English

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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Compound of child +‎ bride.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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child bride (plural child brides)

  1. A very young bride, usually coerced or pressured into nuptials with a much older man, as practiced in some cultures.
    Coordinate term: child groom
    Saudi Arabia is one of the countries that allow minor girls to be child brides.
    • 1878, Frank Leslie's Sunday magazine, Volumes 3-4, page 206
      With a smile and baksheesh for the little fair-faced girl destined to be the child-bride of some unknown Egyptian
    • 1912, Metropolitan, Volume 36, page 1
      Alone in [he]r tent the frightened child-bride [w]aits her husband, who will see her... [sic] ...for the first time.
    • 1993 Alixa Naf, Becoming American, page 142
      Ohio, where she had peddled with her parents until she became a child bride to Salem's brother Khalil, in 1896
    • 2008, Hafiza Nilofar Khan, The University of Southern Mississippi, Treatment of a wife's body in the fiction of Indian subcontinental women writers, page 46
      In this article she discusses the 1992 incident in which a Hyderabadi Muslim father sells his daughter as a child-bride to an Arab named Yahya Mohammed al-Sageih for Rs. 6000.

Translations

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