Gretna Green
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English
Etymology
"Green at the gravelly hill", from Old English greot (“grit”) and hoh (“hill”).
Proper noun
- A village on the border between England and Scotland (in Dumfries and Galloway council area just inside Scotland), famous for easy marriages (OS grid ref NY3168).
- 1845, Leigh Hunt, The Indicator: a Miscellany for the Fields and the Fireside, page 213:
- The Clown is a London cockney, with a prodigious eye to his own comfort and muffins,—a Lord Mayor's fool, who loved "everything that was good;" and Columbine is the boarding-school girl, ripe for running away with, and making a dance of it all the way from Chelsea to Gretna Green.
Noun
Gretna Green (plural Gretna Greens)
- Any town with liberal marriage laws, a place where couples elope.
- 1823 June 12, Lord Redesdale, “Dissenters' marriages”, in parliamentary debates (British House of Lords), page 16:
- It was nothing more nor less than to convert all places licensed under the Toleration Act into Gretna Greens, where persons of all persuasions might go and make irregular marriages.
- Federal Writers Project (1952) West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State, →ISBN, page 485: “A town of narrow streets and smoke-begrimed old buildings, Wellsburg thrived as a Gretna Green for many years”
- 1995, Suzanne Poirier, Chicago's War on Syphilis, 1937-40, →ISBN:
- The sexual irresponsibility attributed to most gin marriages could not help being linked with the possibility of a sexually transmitted infection that accompanied the couples, untested, to Crown Point, Valparaiso, or other Gretna Greens.
Adjective
Gretna Green (not comparable)
- carried out quickly and secretively in a jurisdiction that is not the bride or groom's own. (of a marriage)
- 1833, R. Longley, private correspondence quoted in Peter Ward, Courtship, Love, and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century English Canada, page 110:
- There has been a Gretna Green marriage in Brockville. Miss Mary Ann Hall and a Mr. Underwood ran away to Ogdensburg (New York) and got married last week and was back again the night before last.
- 1836 August, 'Orson', "East Florida—Alligators—the Seminoles, etc.", The Knickerbocker Magazine, page 150:
- He made a very pleasant morning's sport, especially as it was my first conquest, and entitled me to all the privileges of a Floridian. At this my favorite place of resort, a Gretna-Green affair happened, just before my arrival, and was witnessed by a companion who was often with me
- 1861, "Three Months in Labrador", Harper's New Monthly Magazine, volume 22, page 757:
- Just beyond the portal is a cluster of islands, one of them, Gull Island, made famous by a Gretna Green affair of tragic end
- 1833, R. Longley, private correspondence quoted in Peter Ward, Courtship, Love, and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century English Canada, page 110: