Word.ws English Dictionary

widow cleansing

widow cleansing noun: a tradition that requires widowed women to have sexual intercourse as a form of ritual purification.

Noun

widow cleansing (uncountable)

  1. (Africa) A tradition that requires widowed women to have sexual intercourse as a form of ritual purification.
    • A group of women in western Kenya is fighting "widow-cleansing", a traditional ritual practiced by Luo ethnic communities in some of the poorer, more rural areas of the country.2017 December 6, “Kenya widows fight sexual 'cleansing' practise”, in BBC News
    • The practices of widow cleansing, as well as widow inheritance, pose a serious risk of spreading HIV/AIDS to individuals and among the wider community.2019 May 23, Roseline Orwa, “Kenya: education, stigma and widow cleansing”, in LSE blog

Questions about widow cleansing

What does widow cleansing mean?
Widow cleansing means a tradition that requires widowed women to have sexual intercourse as a form of ritual purification.
What part of speech is widow cleansing?
Widow cleansing is a noun.

Words near widow cleansing in the dictionary

  1. widout
  2. widow
  3. widow bewitched
  4. widow bird
  5. widow birds
  6. widow cleansing
  7. widow finch
  8. widow finches
  9. widow foreclosure
  10. widow foreclosures
  11. widow inheritance

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: widow cleansing (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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