dowry

From Middle English dowarye, dowerie, from Anglo-Norman dowarie, douarie, from Old French douaire, from Medieval Latin dōtārium, from Latin dōs.

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈdaʊəɹi/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈdaʊɹi/
• Rhymes: -aʊəɹi, -aʊɹi

dowry (countable and uncountable, plural dowries)

1. Payment, such as property or money, paid by the bride's family to the groom or his family at the time of marriage.[1]
2. (less common) Payment by the groom or his family to the bride's family: bride price.
   • 2009, Peter Uvin, Life after Violence: A People's Story of Burundi, page 125:

     The family of the groom makes sure the new couple has a house to live in and land to cultivate; they will also pay for the dowry (crucial, for without dowry the new father has no rights over his children; Trouwborst 1962: 136ff.)

3. (obsolete) Dower.
4. A natural gift or talent.
5. (informal) A large amount.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of E. M. Forster to this entry?)

   But no palace had so fair a ceiling; for from the wooden beams were suspended a whole dowry of copper vessels—pails, cauldrons, water pots, of every colour from lustrous black to the palest pink.

• dower
• bride price

• marriage-portion

• (bride price): lobola

• dowry death
• reverse dowry
• dowager
• endow

• (large amount): John Camden Hotten (1873) The Slang Dictionary

dowry (third-person singular simple present dowries, present participle dowrying, simple past and past participle dowried)

1. To bestow a dowry upon.
   • 1999, Judith Everard, Michael C. E. Jones, Charters Duchess Constance Br, page xvi:
   • 2013, Noreen Giffney, Margrit Shildrick, Theory on the Edge: Irish Studies and the Politics of Sexual Difference, page 62:
   • 1911, Aida Rodman De Milt, Ways and Days Out of London, page 108:

     1976, Graham Anderson, Studies in Lucian's Comic Fiction, Page 19

• glory box
• hope chest
• trousseau

• rowdy, wordy

dowry

1. Alternative form of dowarye