couvade

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It may be a myth explaining a Celtic use of the "couvade," though no example of a simultaneous tribal couvade is known, unless we have here an instance of Westermarck's "human pairing season in primitive times," with its consequent simultaneous birth-period for women and couvade for men.

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Definitions (4)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. noun A practice in certain cultures in which the husband of a woman in labor takes to his bed as though he were bearing the child.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (1)

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Examples (33)

  • The grotesque comedy of the couvade, which proved a tragedy so often for the poor mother compelled by the custom to rise in her weakness and even neglect her new-born baby, in order to do double work and to tempt the appetite of her lord after his make-believe pangs of childbirth, was one sign that primitive consciousness found the new knowledge of double parentage very exciting The varieties of phallic worship found in so many ages and among so many peoples show how man plumed himself upon the generative function and how he linked it with the god-idea. —  The Family and it's Members
  • Ethnologists who have studied strange marriage customs, such as the "couvade," ought to turn their attention to discovering the causes of this other and socially more important marital vagary 10. —  Broken Homes A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment
  • It may be a myth explaining a Celtic use of the "couvade," though no example of a simultaneous tribal couvade is known, unless we have here an instance of Westermarck's "human pairing season in primitive times," with its consequent simultaneous birth-period for women and couvade for men. —  The Religion of the Ancient Celts
  • If, as is suggested by the "debility" of the Ultonians, and by other evidence, the couvade was a Celtic institution, this would also point to the existence of the matriarchate with the Celts. —  The Religion of the Ancient Celts
  • X] Until very recently the _couvade_ existed in full force and vigor. —  Religion and Lust or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire
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Etymologies (2)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. French, from Old French, from couver, to incubate, hatch, from Latin cubāre, to lie down on.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. French, a brooding, sitting, cowering, from couver, hatch, brood, sit, cower, from Latin cubare, lie down: see cove, covey.
 

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/kuˈvɑd/
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