Word.ws English Dictionary

companionate

companionate adjective: designating a proposed type of marriage (or other partnership) in which the partners plan to have no children and take on no legal obligations to one another.

Adjective

companionate (comparative more companionate, superlative most companionate)

  1. (historical) Designating a proposed type of marriage (or other partnership) in which the partners plan to have no children and take on no legal obligations to one another.
  2. Friendly, companionable.
  3. Pertaining to a (chiefly romantic) relationship that emphasises companionship and mutual respect.
    • Gradually it evolved from an economic enterprise to a companionate one—a free-choice engagement between two individuals, based not on duty and obligation but on love and affection.2017, Esther Perel, The State of Affairs

Forms of companionate

comparativemore companionate
superlativemost companionate

Origin of companionate

From companion + -ate (adjective-forming suffix).

Words formed from companionate

Phrases with companionate

Questions about companionate

What does companionate mean?
Companionate means designating a proposed type of marriage (or other partnership) in which the partners plan to have no children and take on no legal obligations to one another.
What part of speech is companionate?
Companionate is an adjective.

Words near companionate in the dictionary

  1. companionability
  2. companionable
  3. companionableness
  4. companionably
  5. companionage
  6. companionate
  7. companionate marriage
  8. companionate marriages
  9. companioned
  10. companioness
  11. companionesses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: companionate (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: “companionate.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/companionate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.