Definition
A wedding in which the bride is already pregnant.
A wedding which is made in haste or under duress.
Any similarly reputedly forced partnership, between people, organizations, components, or concepts.
Origins
From the implication that the groom was forced to the altar by shotgun-wielding relatives of the bride.
In Context
- "If Red Skelton's joke can still elicit laughs, it is only because there is a minority who can still remember a shotgun wedding and even recall the understandings that lay behind that insistence, now seeming quaint, that a couple sleeping together should really be married."
- "But all this fails when we try to have a shotgun wedding between the two great theories of nature, relativity and quantum theory."
See Also
- shotgun marriage
- white wedding
- grass widow