Cuckold
Mar 24, 2010 femdom
A cuckold is a married man with an adulterous wife. Current usage sometimes extends the term informally to include cuckqueans (women with adulterous husbands), wittols (husbands who consent to their wife’s extramarital sex), and non-married couples in analogous situations.
History of the term cuckold Cuckold is derived from the Old French for the cuckoo, cucu, with the pejorative suffix -old. The earliest written use of the Middle English derivation, cokewold, occurs in 1250. The females of certain varieties of cuckoo lay their eggs in other bird’s nests, freeing themselves from the need to nurture the eggs to hatching. The female equivalent cuckquean first appears in English literature in 1562, adding a female suffix to the “cuck”; Wittol, which substitutes “wete” (meaning witting or knowing) for the first part of the word, first appears in 1520.
Cuckolds have sometimes been written as “wearing the horns of a cuckold” or just “wearing the horns”. This refers to the fact that the man being cuckolded is the last to know of his wife’s infidelity. He is wearing horns that can be seen by everybody but him. This also refers to a tradition claiming that in villages of unknown European location, the community would gather to collectively humiliate a man whose wife gives birth to a child recognizably not his own. According to this legend, a parade was held in which the hapless husband is forced to wear antlers on his head as a symbol of his wife’s infidelity. Whether or not this actually happened is unknown but the phrase has survived (also see the Italian insult cornuto).
Ca. 1815 French satire on cuckoldry, which shows both men and women wearing horns
In French, the equivalent term is porter des cornes, which is used by Molière to describe someone whose consort has been unfaithful. Molière’s L’École des femmes (1662) is the story of a man who mocks cuckolds and becomes one at the end. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c.1372-77), the Miller’s Tale is a story that humorously examines the life of a cuckold.
Source: Wikipedia/cuckold
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