shotgun wedding
shotgun wedding noun: a wedding in which the bride is already pregnant.
Noun
shotgun wedding (plural shotgun weddings)
- A wedding in which the bride is already pregnant.
- If Red Skelton's joke can still elicit laughs, it is only because there is a minority who can still remember a shotgun wedding and even recall the understandings that lay behind that insistence, now seeming quaint, that a couple sleeping together should really be married.2012, Charles W. Dunn, American Culture in Peril, University Press of Kentucky, →ISBN, page 48
- A wedding made in haste or under duress.
- Any similarly reputedly forced partnership, between people, organizations, components, or concepts.
- But all this fails when we try to have a shotgun wedding between the two great theories of nature, relativity and quantum theory.2021, Michio Kaku, The God Equation
Forms of shotgun wedding
| plural | shotgun weddings |
|---|
Origin of shotgun wedding
From the implication that the groom was forced to the altar by shotgun-wielding relatives of the bride.
Questions about shotgun wedding
- What does shotgun wedding mean?
- Shotgun wedding means a wedding in which the bride is already pregnant.
- What part of speech is shotgun wedding?
- Shotgun wedding is a noun.
- What is the plural of shotgun wedding?
- The plural of shotgun wedding is shotgun weddings.
Words near shotgun wedding in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: shotgun 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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-shotgun wedding.ogg.
Cite this entry: “shotgun wedding.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shotgun_wedding. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.