How many husbands, wives, sons, and daughters have we lost to a broken system?
It was doubtless a warm reunion with his family, who are featured in The Cuban wives.
The wives have been traveling for years across the globe to bring attention to the case.
These are men who now have wives and children, and their silence so many years later shows how morally bankrupt they remain.
So, everyone else is there with girlfriends and wives… And I brought my mom.
Then they will cease, and wives and mothers will come here to weep.
All foreigners break their wives' hearts—Nelly's a sensible girl!
Their wives and their womenkind generally, have no position but that of animals.
He lived in the edge of a forest; his people were many; he had forty wives, and the like.
By all the wives that he held most sacred, he felt impelled to resent it.
"to marry (a woman)," Old English wifian, from wif "woman" (see wife). Cf. Middle Dutch wiven.
Old English wif "woman," from Proto-Germanic *wiban (cf. Old Saxon, Old Frisian wif, Old Norse vif, Danish and Swedish viv, Middle Dutch, Dutch wijf, Old High German wib, German Weib), of uncertain origin. Dutch wijf now means, in slang, "girl, babe," having softened somewhat from earlier sense of "bitch."
Some proposed PIE roots include *weip- "to twist, turn, wrap," perhaps with sense of "veiled person" (see vibrate); or *ghwibh-, a proposed root meaning "shame," also "pudenda," but the only examples of it are wife and Tocharian (a lost IE language of central Asia) kwipe, kip "female pudenda."
The modern sense of "female spouse" began as a specialized sense in Old English; the general sense of "woman" is preserved in midwife, old wives' tale, etc. Middle English sense of "mistress of a household" survives in housewife; and later restricted sense of "tradeswoman of humble rank" in fishwife. Wife-swapping is attested from 1954.
noun
