mésalliance

English

Etymology

French més- (“bad”) + alliance (“alliance”).

Pronunciation

• IPA: /me ˈzæ li ɔns/
• Rhymes: dalliance

Noun

mésalliance (plural mésalliances)

1. Marriage with a person of inferior social position.
   • Aylmer and Louise Maude translation of Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace:

     But if you marry the old count you will make his last days happy, and as widow of the Grand...the prince would no longer be making a mésalliance by marrying you.

   • 1871–72, George Eliot, Middlemarch, Chapter 37

     It was an abominable thing that my grandmother should have been disinherited because she made what they called a mésalliance, though there was nothing to be said against her husband except that he was a Polish refugee who gave lessons for his bread.

   • William Makepeace Thackeray:

     In England, a grocer's daughter would think she made a mésalliance by marrying a painter!

   • Mohun Dampier, "Beyond the Walls", Ambrose Bierce:

     To a mésalliance of that kind every globule of my ancestral blood spoke in opposition.

Anagrams

• miscellanea