communal marriage

American  

noun

1. group marriage.

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Etymology

Origin of communal marriage

First recorded in 1865–70

Example Sentences

Sir J. Lubbock, however, as we have seen, attributes the practice in chief part, to the former existence of communal marriage, and to the men having consequently captured 365women from other tribes to hold as their sole property.

From Project Gutenberg

In “How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival,” David Kaiser, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, turns to those wild days in the waning years of the Vietnam War when anything seemed possible: communal marriage, living off the land, bringing down the military with flower power.

From New York Times

This system finds a complete explanation in a certain form of communal marriage now in process of decline in Hawaii and some Australian islands.

From Project Gutenberg

By the side of this marital form, there is in practice on the same islands a system of kinship only explicable by a still more primeval and now extinct form of communal marriage.

From Project Gutenberg

He asserts that communal marriage is purely the outgrowth of imagination, and in so doing falls far behind Bachofen.

From Project Gutenberg