Word.ws English Dictionary

black wedding

black wedding noun: a 19th century Ashkenazi ritual involving a wedding between two orphans that takes place in a graveyard, intended to assist in ending an epidemic.

Noun

black wedding (plural black weddings)

  1. A 19th century Ashkenazi ritual involving a wedding between two orphans that takes place in a graveyard, intended to assist in ending an epidemic.
    • On the eve of the wedding of Hekht's protagonist, Isaac Seltz, war breaks out, his future father-in-law dies, and an epidemic begins. Seltz would prefer to put off the wedding but the inhabitants of the Jewish quarter do not allow it: When Seltz heard it, he was horrified, but he did not speak out....2008, Zsuzsa Hetényi, In a Maelstrom: The History of Russian-Jewish Prose (1860-1940)
    • For another description of such a wedding, see Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, They Called Me Mayer July, 13–14, where a cholera epidemic in 1892 inspired a shvartse khasene (black wedding) between a poor bachelor whose job it was to clean the communal bath and young woman who had lost both...2011, Nathaniel Deutsch, S An-Ski, The Jewish Dark Continent, →ISBN, page 263

Examples of black wedding in a sentence

  • The news of the black wedding already spread in the town.2008, Zsuzsa Hetényi, In a Maelstrom: The History of Russian-Jewish Prose (1860-1940):
  • Some did not want to hear such rational explanations, and on 1 October, Odessa bore witness to a black wedding.2017, Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World:

Forms of black wedding

pluralblack weddings

Questions about black wedding

What does black wedding mean?
Black wedding means a 19th century Ashkenazi ritual involving a wedding between two orphans that takes place in a graveyard, intended to assist in ending an epidemic.
How do you use black wedding in a sentence?
The news of the black wedding already spread in the town.
What part of speech is black wedding?
Black wedding is a noun.
What is the plural of black wedding?
The plural of black wedding is black weddings.

Words near black wedding in the dictionary

  1. black walnut
  2. black walnuts
  3. Black Warrior
  4. black water
  5. Black Wave
  6. black wedding
  7. black weddings
  8. black whale
  9. black whales
  10. black where it counts
  11. black widow

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: black wedding (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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