mésalliance

See also: mesalliance

English

Etymology

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

Pronunciation

(UK) IPA^(key): /mɛˈzæli.əns/
(US) IPA^(key): /meɪzəˈlaɪəns/
Rhymes: dalliance

Noun

mésalliance (plural mésalliances)

Marriage with a person of inferior social position.
- 1840, M. A. Titmarsh [pseudonym; William Makepeace Thackeray], “On the French School of Painting”, in The Paris Sketch Book, volumes (please specify |volume=I or II), London: John Macrone, , →OCLC:
  The case is very different in England, where a grocer's daughter would think she made a mésalliance by marrying a painter […]
- 1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 6, in Vanity Fair , London: Bradbury and Evans , published 1848, →OCLC:
  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.
- 1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (published anonymously), The Coming Race‎, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, page 272:
  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.
- 1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter XXXVII, in Middlemarch , volume II, Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book IV, page 260:
  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.
- 1907, Ambrose Bierce, Beyond the Walls:
  To a mésalliance of that kind every globule of my ancestral blood spoke in opposition.
- 1941, Aylmer and Louise Maude translation of Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace:
  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.