scarlet letter
scarlet letter noun: the letter "A" in scarlet cloth required to be worn by those convicted of adultery in 17th-century Puritan New England.
Noun
scarlet letter (plural scarlet letters)
- The letter "A" in scarlet cloth required to be worn by those convicted of adultery in 17th-century Puritan New England.
- The Scarlet Letter [title]1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
- In the early seventeenth century, all the colonies of New England enacted harsh laws against unchastity: banishment, imprisonment, severe public flogging, the wearing of scarlet letters and other shaming garments for the rest of one's life.2012, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, Penguin, published 2013, page 44
- A highly visible stigma.
- The scarlet letters that current discourse has slapped upon people deemed “problematic,” deemed “unreachable” for feminism, have created consternation […]2018, Dianna E. Anderson, Problematic: How Toxic Callout Culture Is Destroying Feminism
Forms of scarlet letter
| plural | scarlet letters |
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Questions about scarlet letter
- What does scarlet letter mean?
- Scarlet letter means the letter "A" in scarlet cloth required to be worn by those convicted of adultery in 17th-century Puritan New England.
- What part of speech is scarlet letter?
- Scarlet letter is a noun.
- What is the plural of scarlet letter?
- The plural of scarlet letter is scarlet letters.
Words near scarlet letter in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: scarlet letter (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: “scarlet letter.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/scarlet_letter. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.