shotgun wedding

Definition

A wedding in which the bride is already pregnant.

Etymology

From the implication that the groom was forced to the altar by shotgun-wielding relatives of the bride.

Example Sentences

• "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."