# cuckold

Pronunciation: say "KUK-ohld" US /ˈkʌ.koʊld/, UK /ˈkʌ.kəʊld/

## Noun

1. A man whose wife is unfaithful to him, especially one who does not know or will not accept it.
   - Simple: A man whose wife cheats on him, often when he does not know or will not accept it.
   - _The comedy mocks a rich merchant who is the last to learn he is a cuckold._
   - _Village gossip turned the trusting miller and the other cuckolds into figures of fun._
2. A man who is sexually aroused by his partner's infidelity, as a paraphilia.
   - Simple: A man who gets sexually excited when his partner has sex with someone else.
   - _In the survey, the self-identified cuckolds reported feeling aroused rather than betrayed by their partners' affairs._
   - _The novel's narrator is a cuckold who encourages his wife's affairs and waits up eagerly to hear every detail._

## Verb

3. To betray a husband, wife or partner by being sexually unfaithful to them, or by seducing their spouse or partner.
   - Simple: To cheat on your husband, wife or partner, or to have sex with someone else's partner.
   - _After twenty years of marriage, he learned that his wife had been cuckolding him with a neighbor._
   - _In the play, a scheming courtier sets out to cuckold the duke by seducing the duchess._

## Other meanings

- (noun) A name for several tropical western Atlantic fishes, especially the scrawled cowfish and smooth trunkfish, and also the fringed filefish.

## Origin

From Middle English cokewold and similar forms, from Old French cucuault, a compound of cucu ("cuckoo") and the suffix -auld; it refers to the cuckoo's habit of laying its eggs in another bird's nest. Cucu imitates the cuckoo's call or comes from Latin cucūlus, and -auld comes from Frankish *wald ("wielder, ruler"), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₂welh₁- ("to be strong; to rule"). The noun appears in Middle English around 1250, and the verb is first recorded in 1589.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/cuckold (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).