Word.ws English Dictionary

wergild

wergild is the alternative spelling 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 wergild

pluralwergilds

Questions about wergild

What is wergild the alternative spelling of?
Wergild is the alternative spelling of wergeld.

Words near wergild in the dictionary

  1. Wergaia
  2. wergeld
  3. wergelds
  4. wergelt
  5. wergelts
  6. wergild
  7. wergilds
  8. wergyld
  9. wergylds
  10. Werito
  11. werk

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wergild (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.

Last updated:

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