Word.ws English Dictionary

trophy wife

trophy wife noun: a wife, usually young and attractive, regarded as a status symbol for her husband, usually older and affluent.

Noun

trophy wife (plural trophy wives)

  1. (derogatory, idiomatic, informal) A wife, usually young and attractive, regarded as a status symbol for her husband, usually older and affluent.
    • […] while Mrs. Scott-Baxter, his fourth (and trophy) wife, blonde and young and bored, glowered at the Baxter spawn like a mother mink in a mink farm, just waiting for a jet to strafe the facility, affording her an excuse to feign terror and eat her young.1991, Douglas Coupland, “It Can't Last”, in Generation X, New York: St. Martin's Press, →OCLC, page 34
    • But don't expect this one to break up. Arnold [Schwarzenegger] got his trophy wife—a real-life Kennedy, his entreé to the top social echelons in the country—and he's not about to let her go.1993 March, Sally Ogle Davis, “The good, the bad and the disasters”, in Ladies' Home Journal, page 57

Examples of trophy wife in a sentence

  • "Women considered trophy wives are accomplished and ambitious," she reported, "in both their careers and their lives. […] On what was trophy wife bottomed, as they say at the Supreme Court?1994 May 1, William Safire, “ON LANGUAGE; Trophy Wife”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 21 Jun 2021:
  • David was filthy rich, and Belinda was a trophy wife.2013, George G. Nyman, Love Lost in Time Relativity, AuthorHouse, →ISBN, page 12:

Forms of trophy wife

pluraltrophy wives

Origin of trophy wife

Popularized by Julie Connelly in a Fortune magazine cover story in 1989, by analogy with a real estate trophy building.

Words that rhyme with trophy wife

6 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about trophy wife

What does trophy wife mean?
Trophy wife means a wife, usually young and attractive, regarded as a status symbol for her husband, usually older and affluent.
How do you use trophy wife in a sentence?
"Women considered trophy wives are accomplished and ambitious," she reported, "in both their careers and their lives. […] On what was trophy wife bottomed, as they say at the Supreme Court?
What part of speech is trophy wife?
Trophy wife is a noun.
What is the plural of trophy wife?
The plural of trophy wife is trophy wives.

Words near trophy wife in the dictionary

  1. trophy partners
  2. trophy room
  3. trophy rooms
  4. trophy veep
  5. trophy veeps
  6. trophy wife
  7. trophy wives
  8. trophy-hunt
  9. trophy-hunted
  10. trophy-hunter
  11. trophy-hunters

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: trophy wife (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-trophy wife.wav.

Cite this entry: “trophy wife.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/trophy_wife. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.