"scarlet letter" meaning in English

See scarlet letter in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: scarlet letters [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun}} scarlet letter (plural scarlet letters)
  1. (historical) The letter "A" in scarlet cloth required to be worn by those convicted of adultery in 17th-century Puritan New England. Tags: historical
    Sense id: en-scarlet_letter-en-noun-oIg6-FE1
  2. (figurative, by extension) A highly visible stigma. Tags: broadly, figuratively
    Sense id: en-scarlet_letter-en-noun-Kui-c5g5 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 44 56

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for scarlet letter meaning in English (2.0kB)

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      "expansion": "scarlet letter (plural scarlet letters)",
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  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter",
          "text": "The Scarlet Letter [title]",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2012, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, Penguin, published 2013, page 44",
          "text": "In the early seventeenth century, all the colonies of New England enacted harsh laws against unchastity: banishment, imprisonment, severe public flogging, the wearing of scarlet letters and other shaming garments for the rest of one's life.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
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      "glosses": [
        "The letter \"A\" in scarlet cloth required to be worn by those convicted of adultery in 17th-century Puritan New England."
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      "id": "en-scarlet_letter-en-noun-oIg6-FE1",
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        [
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        [
          "New England",
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      "raw_glosses": [
        "(historical) The letter \"A\" in scarlet cloth required to be worn by those convicted of adultery in 17th-century Puritan New England."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "historical"
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    },
    {
      "categories": [
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          "_dis": "44 56",
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
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          "source": "w+disamb"
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        {
          "ref": "2018, Dianna E. Anderson, Problematic: How Toxic Callout Culture Is Destroying Feminism",
          "text": "The scarlet letters that current discourse has slapped upon people deemed “problematic,” deemed “unreachable” for feminism, have created consternation […]",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
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        "A highly visible stigma."
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        "(figurative, by extension) A highly visible stigma."
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{
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    "English nouns"
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  "forms": [
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      "form": "scarlet letters",
      "tags": [
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          "ref": "1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter",
          "text": "The Scarlet Letter [title]",
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          "ref": "2012, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, Penguin, published 2013, page 44",
          "text": "In the early seventeenth century, all the colonies of New England enacted harsh laws against unchastity: banishment, imprisonment, severe public flogging, the wearing of scarlet letters and other shaming garments for the rest of one's life.",
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        "(historical) The letter \"A\" in scarlet cloth required to be worn by those convicted of adultery in 17th-century Puritan New England."
      ],
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      "examples": [
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          "ref": "2018, Dianna E. Anderson, Problematic: How Toxic Callout Culture Is Destroying Feminism",
          "text": "The scarlet letters that current discourse has slapped upon people deemed “problematic,” deemed “unreachable” for feminism, have created consternation […]",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A highly visible stigma."
      ],
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        "(figurative, by extension) A highly visible stigma."
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-03 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). 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.