wife-in-law

Noun

wife-in-law (plural wives-in-law)

1. A wife in law only, such as one who has abandoned her husband

   Synonyms:

   co-wife, sister-wife

2. A wife who provides domestic or social support, but not love or affection
3. Another wife of one's husband. Typically used in cases of divorce and subsequent remarriage for one's husband's ex-wife, but sometimes used in polygamy for a co-wife.
   • Instead she arranges, offhand, a nice little farewell dinner for her husband that was and the lady, Flora, who is to be her successor three months hence. […] Flora is generously constrained to leave the sometime-husband and wife to talk the matter over. "Are we not wives-in-law?" says Madame. And...1922, Felix Emmanuel Schelling, Appraisements and asperities as to some contemporary writers, pages 116–117
   • the collection of people who would gather in either of the two houses for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and sometimes again in summer. This collection involved former mothers-in-law, former husbands, ex-wives of former husbands, and doddering uncles from distant marriages, as well as, of course, the...2002, John Hanson Mitchell, The Wildest Place on Earth: Italian Gardens and the Invention of Wilderness, page 38