Word.ws English Dictionary

were gild

were gild is the alternative form of wergeld.

Meaning of wergeld

Noun

wergeld (countable and uncountable, plural wergelds)

  1. (especially, historical) Blood money, the monetary value assigned to a person, set according to their rank, used to determine the compensation paid by the perpetrator of a crime to the victim in the case of injury or to the victim's kindred in the case of homicide; such a reparative payment or compensation.
    • The first law we find is one of Æthelbirht's:—"if a freeman lie with a freeman's wife, let him pay for it with his 'wer-geld,' and provide another wife with his own money, and bring her to the other."1862, John Benjamin Marsden, The Influence of the Mosaic Code Upon Subsequent Legislation, →ISBN
    Synonyms:
    wer

Forms of were gild

pluralwere gilds

Questions about were gild

What is were gild the alternative form of?
Were gild is the alternative form of wergeld.

Words near were gild in the dictionary

  1. Werber
  2. Werbers
  3. werdingite
  4. Werdnig-Hoffmann disease
  5. were
  6. were gild
  7. were gilds
  8. were it not for
  9. were with
  10. were wolf
  11. were wolves

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: were gild (page history and authors); wergeld (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: “were gild.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/were_gild. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.