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Glite Dictionary
marital status

marital status

9 2.7
Whether a person is married, single, divorced or widowed
  • noun
  • /ˈmɛrɪtəl ˈsteɪtəs/
  • Formal
translation icon : estado civil
  • OK, so this is your marital status, your legal marital status and it's your status as of the last day of the year.
  • age and marital status
  • gender and marital status
  • marital status and ethnicity

Income, education, safety of your community, marital status, having a job.

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Examples

  • There were no significant differences between groups for age and marital status.

    Academic text (1991)

  • Demographic items included age, gender, race and ethnicity, marital status, year of HIV diagnosis, and education.

    Academic text (2012)

  • If you talk to him... about something other than his marital status... you would find out how smart he is.

    Something's Gotta Give (2003)

  • The type of help received differed by age and marital status.

    Academic text (1991)

  • How does this relationship between marital status and life satisfaction, happiness, loneliness, how does that change across time and with age?

  • And if one should want further details, her father's and mother's names, her profession, and marital status.

    Fiction book (1996)

  • Demographic characteristics of the sample of low-income women with respect to age, marital status, and employment.

    Academic text (1991)

  • She called me in Dublin, probing about our marital status.

    Leap Year (2010)

  • Evidence for the impact of SES, ADL, marital status, and depression on rehospitalization is straightforward.

    Academic text (1994)

  • The survey also looked at demographic details: age, marital status, and education levels.

Surface Forms

marital status singular
marital statuses plural

Morphology

marital + status

The meaning 'the condition of being married, single, divorced, or widowed' is directly and compositionally built from 'marital' (concerning marriage) + 'status' (current condition). This ADJ+NOUN pattern and the same logic in many languages (e.g. Spanish 'estado civil', French 'état civil') make the phrase immediately understandable to a B1 learner who knows the constituent words.

Etymology

Marital status comes from old official forms that needed a short label for a person's marriage situation. Think of marital as about marriage and status as a person's legal 'position', so the phrase tells if someone is 'married', 'single', 'divorced', or 'widowed' today.