espoused

espoused (comparative more espoused, superlative most espoused)

1. Having been espoused or claimed; held (as a belief or position).
   • 2009, Don Defreeze, Please Read:

     Contrary to most espoused wisdom, most distance hikers travel alone.

   • 2009, Carole Brooke, Critical Management Perspectives on Information Systems, page 21:

     Yet, all these potential criticisms run counter to the very espoused (if albeit non-universal) types of claims that critical researchers tend to make.

   • 2023, Vincent Okwudiba Anyika, Kelechi Johnmary Ani, “Changing Dynamics of African Diplomacy"Concluding Thoughts from Pre-colonial Era to Contemporary Times”, in Kelechi Johnmary Ani, editor, Political Economy of Colonial Relations and Crisis of Contemporary African Diplomacy, page 279:

     At this early stage, the benefits of Africa's integration have become very espoused by some proactive afrocrats and leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Tafawa Balewa, among others.

2. Married, engaged, or in a committed monogamous relationship.
   • 1866, Alexander Lindsay, Espoused to Christ, page 50:

     Eliezer immediately brought jewels of silver, jewels of gold, and raiment, and offered them to her as the espoused wife of Isaac.

   • 1866, Richard Hobson, Charles Waterton : His Home, Habits, and Handiwork, page 86:

     You could daily see a purely white common goose having become a monogamist, being paired with a Canada male bird, taking her lofty aerial flights in company with her foreign mate, forgettering her former, and her naturally domestic habits, appearing now as an espoused partner, and assuming in all her nuptial felicity, the varied habits of her wild paramour.

   • 2003, Phyllis Rawlins, The Power of the Dream, page 98:

     If an engaged person was caught having sex with someone other than their espoused partner, it was considered adultery, and the law was clear regarding the punishment for such sin: " If a man is found sleeping with another man's wife (those engaged were referred to as 'husband and wife'), both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. You must purge this eveil from Israel." (Deut. 22:22)

   • 2006, Dagmar Reese, Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany, page 118:

     Already in the thinking of Luther, where this process was only barely developed and fell together with the emphatic commandment to the husband to love his espoused partner, there is an indication of the mechanism that was later employed to place limits on the.liberatory element this development harbors, namely, via a gender-specific division of labor and the associated process of the "polarizing of sexual steriotypes."

espoused

1. simple past and past participle of espouse