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Glite Dictionary
to make an honest woman of

to make an honest woman of

1 9.5
To marry a woman, often after a romantic or sexual relationship, to make the relationship legal and respected
  • idiom
  • Archaic
translation icon : hacerla una mujer honesta
  • He promised to make an honest woman of her after their engagement.

Examples

Synonyms

to marry
vsto make an honest woman of
∞ 1.0

To become someone's husband or wife in a ceremony

is used when the purpose is to legalize a prior romantic or sexual relationship
to take a wife
vsto make an honest woman of
  • Archaic
5 9.2

To marry a woman

is used when the act aims to restore respectability after a prior sexual relationship

Antonyms

to abandon
773 3.1

Leave someone or something behind permanently and without care

to dishonor
  • US
48 5.3

To make someone or something lose respect by bad action

How Official

to make an honest woman of
  • Archaic
1 9.5
to live together
  • NSFW
230 2.7
to date
∞ 1.3
to see
  • Informal
∞ 1.0

Surface Forms

make an honest woman of infinitive
making an honest woman of present participle
makes an honest woman of third person singular
made an honest woman of past
made an honest woman of past participle

Morphology

make + an + honest + woman + of

The idiom uses 'honest' in an archaic/societal sense of 'respectable' and functions as a euphemism for marrying someone to legitimize them; this meaning is not a straightforward composition of 'make' + 'honest' + 'woman'. A B1 learner who knows the constituent words would be unlikely to infer the specific sense 'to marry' without cultural or idiomatic knowledge, so the expression is opaque.

Etymology

Make an honest woman of comes from older times when marriage was seen as making a woman an honest woman, that is, a respectable wife and mother. So make here means to change her situation, and the phrase came to mean 'to marry her'.