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Wife

Kinship
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A married woman in relation to her spouse. The term can denote a role shaped by love, law, and domestic life.

Detailed Definition
A wife is a married woman in relation to her spouse. In poetry, the word may carry affection and companionship, but it can also expose expectations placed on women within marriage, households, and inherited traditions. A poem may use wife to consider naming, labor, intimacy, autonomy, faithfulness, motherhood, or widowhood. Its emotional force often arises from the gap between the public role of marriage and the private self within it.
Example
Example in poetry:
“My wife plants basil where the old fence leans” gives the wife an active, memorable presence; A speaker can praise a wife’s laughter as “the bell that calls the house awake”; In Adrienne Rich’s love poetry, intimate female partnership can challenge assumptions about whose love is poetic; “Wife of my long weather, stay” uses an extended weather metaphor for enduring marriage
Additional Notes
Wife names a married woman in relation to her spouse. Its poetic meaning can range from tenderness and partnership to traditional expectations or constraints. Spouse offers a gender-neutral phrasing.
Also Known As
Spouse Wifey Wyf
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