unwed couple
- noun
- /ˈʌnˌwɛd ˈkʌpəl/
:
pareja no casada
- Many unwed couples face societal pressures when it comes to parenting and family planning.
Examples
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Tradition says any unwed couple that visits Tanah Lot will never have happiness in marriage.
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Neither families nor friends of an unwed couple with a child seem to worry about marriage licenses either, except when they belong to a religious group, in which case the couple probably has married.
Academic text (1992) -
The Fragile Families Study (McLanahan, Garfinkel, Reichman, & Teitler, 2001) is the largest research project that has focused on unwed couples and their parenting behavior, where the sample was recruited at hospitals at the time of birth.
Academic text (2005) -
An unwed couple decided to raise their child together, despite not being married.
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The unwed couple enjoyed a picnic in the park, celebrating their anniversary together.
Antonyms
How Committed
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'unwed' = not married and 'couple' = two people/partners, so a B1 learner who knows both words can infer 'a pair in a romantic relationship who are not married.' The negative prefix and the noun combination follow standard English patterns and are cross-linguistically common, making the phrase immediately comprehensible.
Etymology
The phrase unwed couple comes from the word wed, which means 'to marry'. It pictures two people who are together but without a marriage, so unwed couple means 'not legally married'.