Dictionary

mésalliance en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• /meɪ̯zəˈlaɪ̯əns/ (US)
• /mɛˈzæli.əns/ (UK)
• (Southern-England) audio

Etymology

Borrowed from French mésalliance, from mésallier (“to misally”).

Meanings

1. Marriage with a person of inferior social position.
   • But this is too sanguine a belief. Instances of such mésalliance would be as rare as those of intermarriage between the Anglo-Saxon emigrants and the Red Indians. 1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (published anonymously), The Coming Race, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, page 272:
   • He had been revolving in his mind the marriage question pending between Jos and Rebecca, and was not over well pleased that a member of a family into which he, George Osborne, of the —th, was going to marry, should make a mésalliance with a little nobody–a little upstart governess. 1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 6, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC:
   • 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. 1941, Aylmer and Louise Maude translation of Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
   • The case is very different in England, where a grocer's daughter would think she made a mésalliance by marrying a painter […] 1840, M. A. Titmarsh [pseudonym; William Makepeace Thackeray], “On the French School of Painting”, in The Paris Sketch Book, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: John Macrone, […], →OCLC:
   • 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. 1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter XXXVII, in Middlemarch […], volume II, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book IV, page 260:
   • To a mésalliance of that kind every globule of my ancestral blood spoke in opposition. 1907, Ambrose Bierce, Beyond the Walls:

Forms

Translations (6)

de Mesalliance (Translations) · de Missheirat (Translations) · pl mezalians (Translations) · sk mezaliancia (Translations) · fr mésalliance (Translations) · fi epäsäätyinen avioliitto (Translations)