Other forms: cuckolds
A cuckold is a man whose wife has been unfaithful. Called him a cuckold, the cuckold's horns, fear of being a cuckold.
It is archaic and belongs to Elizabethan comedy, where the joke turns up constantly and the horns are the standing sign of it. There has never been an equivalent word for a woman, which says a good deal about what the word was for.
1nouncuckoldA man whose wife has been unfaithful.
“In the old comedy, everyone in town knows he is a cuckold except the husband himself.”
cuckold is an old insult.
Old French cucuault comes from cucu, the cuckoo, which lays its eggs in another bird's nest.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂welh₁-
Middle English
cokewold
English, today
cuckold
Built from
From Middle English cokewold. From Middle English cokolde, cokewold, cockewold, kukwald, kukeweld, from Old French cucuault; a compound of cucu (“cuckoo”) and Old French -auld. The word references the behavior of cuckoo birds where they lay their eggs in another bird’s nest. Cucu is either a directly derived imitative of the sound derivative of the cuckoo's call, or from Latin cucūlus. Latin cucūlus is a compound of onomatopoeic cucu (compare Latin cucus) and the diminutive suffix -ulus. -auld is from Frankish -wald (similar suffixes are used in some personal names within other Germanic languages as well; compare Harold, for instance), a suffixal use of Frankish wald (“wielder, ruler, leader”), from Proto-Germanic waldaz (compare German Gewalt, from the related waldą (“power, might”)), from waldaną (“to rule”), from Proto-Indo-European h₂welh₁- (“to be strong; to rule”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA