Noun: cuckold
| Singular | cuckold |
| Plural | cuckolds |
Sample Sentences
-
If I never marry, I shall never be a cuckold. [1546, François Rabelais, The Third Book, Chapter 36]
-
You see, it happened that two lieutenantesses were fighting, because their husbands had made cuckolds of them ... [1994, An Anthology of Russian Women’s Writing, 1777-1992, page 183:]
-
In the early English drama, no play better approximates Ovid's contemptuous portrait of the willing cuckold than does Thomas Middleton's Chaste Maid in Cheapside (ca. 1612). [2001, Goran V. Stanivukovic, Ovid and the Renaissance Body, page 178:]
-
Nothing captured the alt-right mentality better than cuckservative, with its taunt that moderation is unmanly and certain conservative males are cuckolds. [2017 December 22, Dominic Green, “Are You Sufficiently Woke?”, in The Weekly Standard, Washington, retrieved 10 Feb 2022:]
Nouns inflected like cuckold
soldier's woundwort,
Nicosian,
whopper,
greypate,
tactile sign language,
chronotrope,
Rosie Lee,
dissentient,
photoinactivator,
sulphonediimine,
coastal waterfall,
residuary devise,
bituminization,
nitrosonaphthol,
smṛiti,
geosphere,
backscreen,
mensuralist,
flocculate,
flocculant, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
1. From Middle English cokolde, cokewold, cockewold, kukwald, kukeweld, from Old French cucuault; a compound of cucu (“cuckoo”) and Old French -auld. The word references the behavior of cuckoo birds where they lay their eggs in another bird’s nest. Cucu is either a directly derived onomatopoeic derivative of the cuckoo's call, or from Latin cucūlus. Latin cucūlus is a compound of onomatopoeic cucu (compare Late Latin cucus) and the diminutive suffix -ulus.
2. Old French -auld is from Frankish *-wald (similar suffixes are used in some personal names within other Germanic languages as well; compare English Harold, for instance), a suffixal use of Frankish *wald (“wielder, ruler, leader”), from Proto-Germanic *waldaz (compare German Gewalt, from the related *waldą (“power, might”)), from *waldaną (“to rule”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂welh₁- (“to be strong; to rule”).
3. Appears in Middle English in noun form circa 1250 as cokewald. First known use of the verb form is 1589. See: Middle English Nouns '
cokolde', Latin Nouns '
cucūlus', Latin Nouns '
cucūlus', German Nouns '
Gewalt'.
Verbs referencing "cuckold"
Irish Nouns
cucól.