"monkey's wedding" meaning in All languages combined

See monkey's wedding on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Forms: monkeys' weddings [plural]
Etymology: Perhaps patterned after the Portuguese casamento de rapôsa, literally "vixen's wedding", used in the same sense. The Portuguese phrase may have been changed to casamento de macaco, "monkey's wedding", in Portugal's southern African colonies. Alternatively, it may have entered South African English from the Zulu phrase umshado we zinkawu, which literally means "wedding for monkeys". Head templates: {{en-noun|monkeys' weddings}} monkey's wedding (plural monkeys' weddings)
  1. (South Africa) A sun shower. Tags: South-Africa Related terms: devil's beating his wife [US, phrase]
    Sense id: en-monkey's_wedding-en-noun-eeguNCqL Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries, South African English

Inflected forms

{
  "etymology_text": "Perhaps patterned after the Portuguese casamento de rapôsa, literally \"vixen's wedding\", used in the same sense. The Portuguese phrase may have been changed to casamento de macaco, \"monkey's wedding\", in Portugal's southern African colonies. Alternatively, it may have entered South African English from the Zulu phrase umshado we zinkawu, which literally means \"wedding for monkeys\".",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "monkeys' weddings",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "monkeys' weddings"
      },
      "expansion": "monkey's wedding (plural monkeys' weddings)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Pages with 1 entry",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Pages with entries",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "South African English",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1939, Country Life, volume 85, page 290:",
          "text": "\"Hullo, there's a monkey's wedding,\" said my wife's niece, a girl of about twenty, born in South Africa […] She was looking out on the lawn, and it was one of those lovely April mornings with sunshine and rain alternating[…]",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1965, Doris Lessing, Landlocked, HarperPerennial, published 1995, page 132:",
          "text": "She went on to supply a series of vague remarks until he was not listening: that […] the rain that afternoon had been a real monkey's wedding, half storm, half sunshine.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2010, Claire Datnow, Behind The Walled Garden of Apartheid, page 31:",
          "text": "\"Look, it's a monkey's wedding!\" Ba exclaimed, using a well-known South African expression referring to rain and sunshine occurring at the same time, and admiring the eerie effect of rain falling through a burst of sunshine.",
          "type": "quote"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A sun shower."
      ],
      "id": "en-monkey's_wedding-en-noun-eeguNCqL",
      "links": [
        [
          "sun shower",
          "sun shower"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(South Africa) A sun shower."
      ],
      "related": [
        {
          "raw_tags": [
            "for when this occurs"
          ],
          "tags": [
            "US",
            "phrase"
          ],
          "word": "devil's beating his wife"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "South-Africa"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "monkey's wedding"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "Perhaps patterned after the Portuguese casamento de rapôsa, literally \"vixen's wedding\", used in the same sense. The Portuguese phrase may have been changed to casamento de macaco, \"monkey's wedding\", in Portugal's southern African colonies. Alternatively, it may have entered South African English from the Zulu phrase umshado we zinkawu, which literally means \"wedding for monkeys\".",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "monkeys' weddings",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "monkeys' weddings"
      },
      "expansion": "monkey's wedding (plural monkeys' weddings)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "related": [
    {
      "raw_tags": [
        "for when this occurs"
      ],
      "tags": [
        "US",
        "phrase"
      ],
      "word": "devil's beating his wife"
    }
  ],
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "Pages with 1 entry",
        "Pages with entries",
        "Quotation templates to be cleaned",
        "South African English"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1939, Country Life, volume 85, page 290:",
          "text": "\"Hullo, there's a monkey's wedding,\" said my wife's niece, a girl of about twenty, born in South Africa […] She was looking out on the lawn, and it was one of those lovely April mornings with sunshine and rain alternating[…]",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1965, Doris Lessing, Landlocked, HarperPerennial, published 1995, page 132:",
          "text": "She went on to supply a series of vague remarks until he was not listening: that […] the rain that afternoon had been a real monkey's wedding, half storm, half sunshine.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2010, Claire Datnow, Behind The Walled Garden of Apartheid, page 31:",
          "text": "\"Look, it's a monkey's wedding!\" Ba exclaimed, using a well-known South African expression referring to rain and sunshine occurring at the same time, and admiring the eerie effect of rain falling through a burst of sunshine.",
          "type": "quote"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A sun shower."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "sun shower",
          "sun shower"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(South Africa) A sun shower."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "South-Africa"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "monkey's wedding"
}

Download raw JSONL data for monkey's wedding meaning in All languages combined (2.2kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-11-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-10-02 using wiktextract (fbeafe8 and 7f03c9b). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.