Other forms: married, marrying, marries
To marry somebody is to become their husband or wife. English says marry someone with no preposition — he married her — and marry to only when a third party does the joining, as a priest marries one person to another.
That missing preposition is the classic error, because most European languages put one in. Get married is the commoner form in speech and takes to: she got married to a teacher. The person who performs the ceremony also marries the couple, which is a second, transitive sense sitting right beside the first. A figurative use is common in writing: marry two ideas, a design that marries comfort and speed.
1verbmarryTo become somebody's husband or wife.~96%
“They married in a registry office with two witnesses.”
synonyms: wed
2verbpriestOf a priest or official, to perform the ceremony joining two people.~2%
“The vicar who married them had known them since school.”
3verbcombineTo combine two things successfully.~2%
“The design marries old brick and new glass.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
marry is a way of joining two people.
Latin maritare, to wed, comes from maritus, a husband — and behind that is a root meaning a young man. The same word gives marital and, at one remove, the marriage in every European language that borrowed from Latin.
Proto-Indo-European
*méryos — young man
Latin
marito — to wed
Anglo-Norman
marïer
Middle English
marien
English, today
marry
Built from
From Middle English marien, from Anglo-Norman marïer, from Latin marito (“to wed”), from marītus (“husband, suitor”), from mās (“man, male”), of unknown origin. Possibly from Proto-Indo-European méryos (“young man”), same source as Sanskrit मर्य (“suitor, young man”). Compare its feminine derivatives: Welsh morwyn (“girl”), merch (“daughter”), gme-cgo marzus (“wedding”), Ancient Greek μεῖραξ (“boy; girl”), Lithuanian martì (“bride”), ae 𐬨𐬀𐬌𐬭𐬌𐬌𐬀 (“yeoman”).) Displaced native hīwian.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA