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Glite Dictionary
red wedding

red wedding

1 9.9
A scene in a story when people are suddenly killed or betrayed, shocking the audience
  • noun
  • NSFW
translation icon : boda roja
  • In the story, the red wedding marks a turning point filled with treachery and bloodshed.

Examples

  • Are we sure it's the red wedding?

    Blog text (1)

  • The unexpected betrayal during the red wedding shocked all the guests and left them in disbelief.

  • Many fans refer to the red wedding as one of the most memorable moments in television history.

Surface Forms

red wedding singular
red weddings plural

Morphology

red + wedding

A B1 learner who knows 'red' as indicating blood/gore and 'wedding' as a marriage event can reasonably infer a literal sense of a bloody or violent wedding from the combination, so the basic violent meaning is accessible from the parts. However, the strong cultural allusion to the specific, notorious Game of Thrones massacre and its betrayal/consequential connotations are not predictable from the words alone, so the expression is only partially transparent.

Etymology

Red wedding comes from a famous scene in the TV series Game of Thrones where a happy wedding suddenly became a bloody massacre, with red blood everywhere. Because of that shocking image, people now use red wedding to mean 'an event with sudden violence or betrayal'.