Marriage

My roommate and I had a discussion earlier in the evening about gay rights, during which he took a fairly conservative stance on the subject and said that he was "fine with gay rights, as long as they hold to the actual definition of marriage and not call it same-sex marriage." In an attempt to prove some sort of point, I decided to look up the definition of marriage.

The AHD defines marriage as "the legal union of a man and a woman, a husband and wife", a definition my roommate would agree with. Then the AHD turns around and provides another definition: "a union of two persons having the customary but usually not the legal force of marriage", also know as a same-sex marriage.

The OED defines marriage as "the condition of being a husband or wife; the relation between persons married to each other; matrimony", but also states that this term is now sometimes used to decribe long-term relationships between partners of the same sex. Marriage is also defined as "the bland or merger of two things".

I did not set out to necessarily prove my roommate wrong. My intention was more so to show that the meanings of some words are gradually changing, even though their definitions are controversial and/or debated.

Marriage comes from the ME word mariage, which was derived from the OFr. verb marier, which means "to marry".