Word.ws English Dictionary

bride-ale

bride-ale noun: a rustic wedding feast.

Noun

bride-ale (plural bride-ales)

  1. (Northern England, archaic) A rustic wedding feast
    • here was a bride-ale broke In the nick1633 (first performance), Ben Jonson, “A Tale of a Tub. A Comedy […]”, in The Works of Beniamin Jonson, […] (Third Folio), London: […] Thomas Hodgkin, for H[enry] Herringman, E. Brewster, T. Bassett...
    Synonyms:
    bridal
  2. (Northern England) The warmed, sweetened, and spiced ale presented to a wedding party on its return from church.

Synonyms of bride-ale

Forms of bride-ale

pluralbride-ales
alternative formbridal

Origin of bride-ale

From Middle English brydale, from Old English brȳdealo (“wedding feast”), equivalent to bride + ale.

Questions about bride-ale

What does bride-ale mean?
Bride-ale means a rustic wedding feast.
What part of speech is bride-ale?
Bride-ale is a noun.
What is the plural of bride-ale?
The plural of bride-ale is bride-ales.

Words near bride-ale in the dictionary

  1. bride's bonnet
  2. bride's flower
  3. bride's flowers
  4. bride's maid
  5. bride's maids
  6. bride-ale
  7. bride-ales
  8. bride-cake
  9. bride-cakes
  10. bride-gift
  11. bride-gifts

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bride-ale (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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Cite this entry: “bride-ale.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bride-ale. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.