Word.ws English Dictionary

Mari Lwyd

/meri lʊid/

Mari Lwyd proper noun: a Welsh winter holiday custom involving wassailing with a horse's skull carried by a person hidden under a sheet.

mari lwyd: a Welsh winter holiday custom involving wassailing with a horse's skull carried by a person hidden...
Image: Mickwidder, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Proper noun

Mari Lwyd

  1. A Welsh winter holiday custom involving wassailing with a horse's skull carried by a person hidden under a sheet.
    1. (broadly, with-definite-article) The name of the character itself.

Origin of Mari Lwyd

Borrowed from Welsh Mari Lwyd, with soft mutation (after a feminine noun) of llwyd (“grey”). The first part may be a form of the name Mary or a use of the English word mare. See Wikipedia for fuller discussion of these and other possibilities. In Welsh the name is used with the definite article and consequent soft mutation, y Fari Lwyd.

Questions about Mari Lwyd

What does Mari Lwyd mean?
Mari Lwyd means a Welsh winter holiday custom involving wassailing with a horse's skull carried by a person hidden under a sheet.
What part of speech is Mari Lwyd?
Mari Lwyd is a proper noun.
How do you pronounce Mari Lwyd?
Mari Lwyd is pronounced /meri lʊid/.

Words near Mari Lwyd in the dictionary

  1. Marheshvan
  2. Marholm
  3. Mari
  4. mari complaisant
  5. Mari El
  6. Mari Lwyd
  7. maria
  8. Maria Aurora
  9. Maria Clara
  10. Maria Clara gown
  11. Maria Clara gowns

Source and license

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