See trophy wife in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
{
"etymology_text": "Popularized by Julie Connelly in a Fortune magazine cover story in 1989, by analogy with a real estate trophy building.",
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"ref": "1991, Douglas Coupland, “It Can't Last”, in Generation X, New York: St. Martin's Press, →OCLC, page 34:",
"text": "[…] while Mrs. Scott-Baxter, his fourth (and trophy) wife, blonde and young and bored, glowered at the Baxter spawn like a mother mink in a mink farm, just waiting for a jet to strafe the facility, affording her an excuse to feign terror and eat her young.",
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"ref": "1993 March, Sally Ogle Davis, “The good, the bad and the disasters”, in Ladies' Home Journal, page 57:",
"text": "But don't expect this one to break up. Arnold [Schwarzenegger] got his trophy wife—a real-life Kennedy, his entreé to the top social echelons in the country—and he's not about to let her go.",
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"ref": "1994 May 1, William Safire, “ON LANGUAGE; Trophy Wife”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 21 Jun 2021:",
"text": "\"Women considered trophy wives are accomplished and ambitious,\" she reported, \"in both their careers and their lives. […] On what was trophy wife bottomed, as they say at the Supreme Court?",
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"ref": "2008, Julia Llewellyn, The Model Wife, Penguin UK, →ISBN:",
"text": "‘She's with her nanny.’ ‘Oh yeah, I forgot. You're a proper trophy wife now. Staff and everything. Well…’ She produced a bottle of cava from a plastic bag. ‘With no child to keep up appearances for, let's get ourselves in the mood.’",
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"ref": "2013, George G. Nyman, Love Lost in Time Relativity, AuthorHouse, →ISBN, page 12:",
"text": "She was David's fourth wife. Twenty-four years his junior, they both knew why they were together. David was filthy rich, and Belinda was a trophy wife. In fact, this was her third time around in this career: Being a trophy wife.",
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"A wife, usually young and attractive, regarded as a status symbol for her husband, usually older and affluent."
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{
"code": "cmn",
"lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
"lang_code": "cmn",
"roman": "huāpíng lǎopó",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"word": "花瓶老婆"
},
{
"code": "cmn",
"lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
"lang_code": "cmn",
"roman": "huāpíngqī",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"word": "花瓶妻"
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"lang_code": "da",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
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"common-gender"
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},
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"lang_code": "fi",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"word": "edustusvaimo"
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"lang_code": "de",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"tags": [
"feminine"
],
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},
{
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"lang_code": "de",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"tags": [
"derogatory",
"feminine",
"often"
],
"word": "Trophäenfrau"
},
{
"code": "he",
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"lang_code": "he",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"word": "אישה לקישוט"
},
{
"code": "he",
"lang": "Hebrew",
"lang_code": "he",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"word": "אישה ייצוגית"
},
{
"code": "he",
"lang": "Hebrew",
"lang_code": "he",
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"word": "אישה לראווה"
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"lang_code": "nb",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"tags": [
"feminine",
"masculine"
],
"word": "trofékone"
},
{
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"lang": "Portuguese",
"lang_code": "pt",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"tags": [
"feminine"
],
"word": "esposa troféu"
},
{
"code": "ru",
"lang": "Russian",
"lang_code": "ru",
"roman": "trofejnaja žena",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"word": "трофейная жена"
}
]
}
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"word": "trophy wife"
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{
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"text": "[…] while Mrs. Scott-Baxter, his fourth (and trophy) wife, blonde and young and bored, glowered at the Baxter spawn like a mother mink in a mink farm, just waiting for a jet to strafe the facility, affording her an excuse to feign terror and eat her young.",
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"ref": "1993 March, Sally Ogle Davis, “The good, the bad and the disasters”, in Ladies' Home Journal, page 57:",
"text": "But don't expect this one to break up. Arnold [Schwarzenegger] got his trophy wife—a real-life Kennedy, his entreé to the top social echelons in the country—and he's not about to let her go.",
"type": "quotation"
},
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"ref": "1994 May 1, William Safire, “ON LANGUAGE; Trophy Wife”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 21 Jun 2021:",
"text": "\"Women considered trophy wives are accomplished and ambitious,\" she reported, \"in both their careers and their lives. […] On what was trophy wife bottomed, as they say at the Supreme Court?",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
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"ref": "2008, Julia Llewellyn, The Model Wife, Penguin UK, →ISBN:",
"text": "‘She's with her nanny.’ ‘Oh yeah, I forgot. You're a proper trophy wife now. Staff and everything. Well…’ She produced a bottle of cava from a plastic bag. ‘With no child to keep up appearances for, let's get ourselves in the mood.’",
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"text": "She was David's fourth wife. Twenty-four years his junior, they both knew why they were together. David was filthy rich, and Belinda was a trophy wife. In fact, this was her third time around in this career: Being a trophy wife.",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
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"A wife, usually young and attractive, regarded as a status symbol for her husband, usually older and affluent."
],
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"(informal, idiomatic, derogatory) A wife, usually young and attractive, regarded as a status symbol for her husband, usually older and affluent."
],
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"translations": [
{
"code": "cmn",
"lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
"lang_code": "cmn",
"roman": "huāpíng lǎopó",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"word": "花瓶老婆"
},
{
"code": "cmn",
"lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
"lang_code": "cmn",
"roman": "huāpíngqī",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"word": "花瓶妻"
},
{
"code": "da",
"lang": "Danish",
"lang_code": "da",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"tags": [
"common-gender"
],
"word": "trofækone"
},
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"lang_code": "fi",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"word": "edustusvaimo"
},
{
"code": "de",
"lang": "German",
"lang_code": "de",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"tags": [
"feminine"
],
"word": "Vorzeigefrau"
},
{
"code": "de",
"lang": "German",
"lang_code": "de",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"tags": [
"derogatory",
"feminine",
"often"
],
"word": "Trophäenfrau"
},
{
"code": "he",
"lang": "Hebrew",
"lang_code": "he",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"word": "אישה לקישוט"
},
{
"code": "he",
"lang": "Hebrew",
"lang_code": "he",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"word": "אישה ייצוגית"
},
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"code": "he",
"lang": "Hebrew",
"lang_code": "he",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"word": "אישה לראווה"
},
{
"code": "nb",
"lang": "Norwegian Bokmål",
"lang_code": "nb",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"tags": [
"feminine",
"masculine"
],
"word": "trofékone"
},
{
"code": "pt",
"lang": "Portuguese",
"lang_code": "pt",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"tags": [
"feminine"
],
"word": "esposa troféu"
},
{
"code": "ru",
"lang": "Russian",
"lang_code": "ru",
"roman": "trofejnaja žena",
"sense": "young attractive wife serving as a status symbol for her husband",
"word": "трофейная жена"
}
],
"word": "trophy wife"
}
Download raw JSONL data for trophy wife meaning in English (6.3kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-01-19 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-01-01 using wiktextract (d1270d2 and 9905b1f). 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.