monkey's wedding
monkey's wedding noun: a sun shower.
Noun
monkey's wedding (plural monkeys' weddings)
- A sun shower.
- "Hullo, there's a monkey's wedding," said my wife's niece, a girl of about twenty, born in South Africa […] She was looking out on the lawn, and it was one of those lovely April mornings with sunshine and rain alternating[…]1939, Country Life, volume 85, page 290
- She went on to supply a series of vague remarks until he was not listening: that […] the rain that afternoon had been a real monkey's wedding, half storm, half sunshine.1965, Doris Lessing, Landlocked, HarperPerennial, published 1995, page 132
Forms of monkey's wedding
| plural | monkeys' weddings |
|---|
Origin of monkey's wedding
Perhaps patterned after the Portuguese casamento de rapôsa, literally "vixen's wedding", used in the same sense. The Portuguese phrase may have been changed to casamento de macaco, "monkey's wedding", in Portugal's southern African colonies. Alternatively, it may have entered South African English from the Zulu phrase umshado we zinkawu, which literally means "wedding for monkeys".
Questions about monkey's wedding
- What does monkey's wedding mean?
- Monkey's wedding means a sun shower.
- What part of speech is monkey's wedding?
- Monkey's wedding is a noun.
- What is the plural of monkey's wedding?
- The plural of monkey's wedding is monkeys' weddings.
Words near monkey's wedding in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: monkey's 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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