wifebeating

English

Etymology

From wife +‎ beating.

Noun

wifebeating (countable and uncountable, plural wifebeatings)

1. The act or practice of physically assaulting one's wife.
   • 1981, Marlene Cummings, Greta Marshall, Governor's Violence Against Women Task Force:

     That suggests that the wifebeatings in this nation are running into the many millions annually!

   • 1997, Chuck Eddy, The Accidental Evolution of Rock'n'roll, page 22:

     But creepily enough, from '30s delta bluesman Robert Johnson's beating-until-satisfied "Me and Devil Blues" to Jackie Gleason's 1954 "One Of These Days — Pow!" to Dion's face-slapping 1962 "Little Diane" to Lou Reed exclaiming "you better hit her" in "There She Goes Again" to the Intruders chasing girls and beating 'em up in their 1968 beach-soul hit "Cowboys to Girls" to the "wifebeating has been around for 10,000 years" headline fronting Guns N' Roses Lies, those in favor seem more prevalent.

   • 2013, Cheris Kramarae, Lana F. Rakow, The Revolution in Words, page 116:

     Though many states had laws by 1870 that prohibited wifebeating, the laws seem to have been enforced only weakly.

Adjective

wifebeating (comparative more wifebeating, superlative most wifebeating)

1. Alternative form of wife-beating
   • 1994, Dio - Volumes 4-9, page 47:

     But the Clark-Darden experiment was better: mass-racist black-cheering of a wifebeating killer's release was an invaluable wakeup-shock to even the densest traditional civil-righteous Lib.

   • 2014, Ru Emerson, The Craft of Light:

     So I was in a world where all the men were wifebeating drunkards and I forgot.

   • 2016 March 17, Tim Martin, “High-Rise hell: the doomed tower blocks that inspired Ben Wheatley's new film”, in The Telegraph:

     Thinly disguised as Windsor House, “the lone tower block at the end of Golborne Road”, it is where the darts-playing, wifebeating criminal Keith Talent lives in Martin Amis’s novel London Fields (1989).