Dictionary

unwive en · VERB

Etymology

From un- + wive.

Meanings

1. (archaic, transitive) To divest of a wife; to divorce (someone) from his wife.
2. (archaic, transitive) To cause (a woman) no longer to be a wife.
   • State law was not needed to unwive her. She had never been a wife. She had experienced nothing, given nothing. She had mocked passion with barter, and starved love with selfishness. 1913 August, Constance Skinner, “Give Hand and Follow”, in Ainslee’s Magazine, volume 32, number 1, page 74:
   • […] that bedroom long-closed and musty, that sheetless bed (that nuptial couch of love and grief) with the pale and bloody corpse in its patched and weathered gray crimsoning the bare mattress, the bowed and unwived widow kneeling beside it […] 1936, William Faulkner, chapter 5, in Absalom, Absalom!, New York: Vintage, published 1990:

Forms