Definition of cuckold
: a man whose wife is unfaithful
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Recent Examples of cuckold from the Web
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Her persona on-screen was that of a glossy, almost mannequin-like sophisticate, a swan-necked beauty with high cheekbones who yearns, cuckolds and destroys with not so much as a Gallic shrug.
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Paul Sparks is Koresh’s right-hand man and cuckold Steve Schneider, with Andrea Riseborough as Judy Schneider, who gives birth to a child by Koresh.
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The show presents the former as both a pimp and a cuckold, the latter as an abusive husband and — egads! — a cigarette smoker.
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The Walking Dead, which in the last three years has killed off almost every person of color and turned the rest into concubines and cuckolds?
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Even Shakespeare and Chaucer cracked wise about cuckolds, who were often depicted wearing horns.
These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'cuckold.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
The Many Synonyms of cuckold
One of the more glaring inequities of the English language is that it has a significantly larger number of words for “a man whose wife is unfaithful” than it does for “a woman whose man is unfaithful.” Cuckold is perhaps the best known of these words, and it has many synonyms, including (but by no means restricted to) cornute, cornuto, hoddy-doddy, hoddypoll, horn, ram, and wittol (a man who is aware of his wife’s infidelity and acquiesces to it). What of a woman whose husband is unfaithful? For that our language appears to have but a single word, and an obscure one at that: cuckquean.
Origin and Etymology of cuckold
Middle English cokewold
NEW! Time Traveler
First Known Use: 13th century
in the meaning defined above
See Words from the same yearCUCKOLD Defined for English Language Learners
Definition of cuckold for English Language Learners
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: a man whose wife has sex with someone else : a man's whose wife commits adultery
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