octogamy
English edit
Etymology edit
From octo- + -gamy. Compare Middle English octogamie.
Noun edit
octogamy (uncountable)
- The state of having eight spouses simultaneously.
- 1865 March 25, Vere Haldane, “'Would-Be Wives, Beware!': A Caution Founded On Fact”, in Once A Week, page 378:
- I regret to say John has never had that pleasure yet; but if the "Honourable" Herbert D'Aulnoy should darken my doors again, I should feel it my duty to communicate certain facts about him to Sir Richard Mayne and Mr. Pollaky, and to ensure his conviction for bigamy, trigamy, quadrigamy, or perhaps octogamy, at the Old Bailey.
- 1888, Florence Nightingale, letter to Maude Verney dated 2 February 1888, published in Lynn McDonald, Florence Nightingale: An Introduction to Her Life and Family (2010), page 713:
- The best wardmaster in Scutari had eight wives—I mean eight wives alive—at different stations. […] He was tried when he came home at Warwick Assizes for what was euphoniously called bigamy, but was octogamy.
- 2011, Joyce E. Kelley, "Beating them to the Punch: satirizing sensation from the 1860s comic journal to Braddon's The Doctor's Wife", Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, Spring 2011:
- The author devotes almost an entire page of the essay to rewriting [Mary Elizabeth] Braddon's fiction, replacing bigamy with octogamy and inventing a sensation author who, writing between meals, creates three murderous polygamist heroines in one day--including one who, having poisoned twenty-seven lovers, flies off "to sunny Italy ... with the stable boy."