English

Alternative forms

• child-bride
• childbride

Noun

child bride ‎(plural child brides)

1. A very young bride, usually coerced or pressured into nuptials with a much older man in a conservative culture
   • 1878, Frank Leslie's Sunday magazine, Volumes 3-4, page 206

     With a smile and baksheesh for the little fair-faced girl destined to be the child-bride of some unknown Egyptian

   • 1912, Metropolitan, Volume 36, page 1

     Alone in [he]r tent the frightened child-bride [w]aits her husband, who will see her... [sic] ...for the first time.

   • 1993 Alixa Naf, Becoming American, page 142

     Ohio, where she had peddled with her parents until she became a child bride to Salem's brother Khalil, in 1896

   • 2008, Hafiza Nilofar Khan, The University of Southern Mississippi, Treatment of a wife's body in the fiction of Indian subcontinental women writers, page 46

     In this article she discusses the 1992 incident in which a Hyderabadi Muslim father sells his daughter as a child-bride to an Arab named Yahya Mohammed al-Sageih for Rs. 6000.

   Saudi Arabia is one of the countries that allow minor girls to be child brides.

Coordinate terms

• child groom

Translations