I Now Pronounce You: 10 Unusual Wedding Words

I love discovering things -- may it be places, persons, things, and most of all words. I enjoy vocabulary building. 

Today, I discovered new words, 10 unusual wedding words, from Dictionary.com.

1. Bridaller - If the expression "wedding guest" feels too impersonal or generic for your tastes, perhaps you'd like to call your beloved revelers bridallers. The singular of this rare word means "a guest at a wedding." Its root word, bridal, originally meant "a wedding" or "a wedding feast." The origin of the word bride is uncertain, although it might be linked to the Proto-Indo-European root bru- meaning "to cook, brew, make broth."
2. Epithalamion - If witnessing a heartfelt exchange of wedding vows moves you to song, take note: the resulting ditty might be referred to as an epithalamion, defined as "a song or poem in honor of a bride and bridegroom." It is very close in meaning to the word prothalamion; both words are built on the Greek word for “bedroom” or “bridal chamber,” thalamus. The difference lies in their prefixes: epi- means "upon," and pro- means "before." Prothalamion, which refers to a song or poem written in celebration of a forthcoming wedding, was coined by the English poet Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene.
3. Foy - To walk down the aisle is to embark on a lifelong journey, which is perhaps why the Scottish dialectical term foy, which broadly means "a farewell gift, feast, or drink," is sometimes used in Scotland to refer to what people in the US might call a bachelorette party: a party given in honor of a woman on the eve of her marriage. Etymologists link it to the French term voie meaning "way” or “ journey."
4. Paranymph - Wedding terminology is peppered with words that have been historically bound to gender, such as bride and groom. But one lesser-known wedding word with unisex applicability is paranymph, meaning "a groomsman or a bridesmaid." It translates literally from the Greek paránymphos as "the person beside the bride." The oldest sense of the word nymph referred to a class of lesser deities of mythology, though by the late 1500s, the term could refer, less supernaturally, to a maiden.

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