incest

Definition

Sexual relations between close relatives, especially immediate family members and sometimes first cousins, usually considered taboo.

Etymology

Learned borrowing from Latin incestus. Displaced Old English mǣġhǣmed (literally “relative-sex”). Doublet of inchaste.

Example Sentences

• "Genetic problems caused by incest are thought to have plagued many royal families in the Middle Ages."
• "For a structuralist like Edmund Leach, the structure is the meaning. Genesis, for example, is about incest taboos; all the rest is noise and mystification."
• "He was only Craster's whelp, an abomination born of incest, not the son of the King-beyond-the-Wall."

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