Other forms: weddings
A wedding is the ceremony where two people marry, and the party that follows it. Rings, a signature in a register, somebody's uncle crying, and a long lunch full of speeches.
Keep wedding and marriage apart: the wedding is the day, the marriage is everything after it — 'our wedding was in June; the marriage lasted forty years.' The word builds compounds without end: wedding dress, wedding ring, wedding cake, wedding day, wedding invitation, wedding reception, wedding anniversary. A silver wedding is twenty-five years of marriage, a golden wedding fifty. You go TO a wedding and you get married AT one. A shotgun wedding is one arranged in a hurry, and nobody means it kindly.
1nounweddingThe ceremony at which two people are married, together with the celebration afterwards.~98%
“The wedding is at two, and the meal at four.”
2nounanniversaryAn anniversary of a marriage, in phrases such as silver wedding.~2%
“Their golden wedding brought the whole family back to the village.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
wedding is a ceremony.
A wedding began as a promise rather than a party. Old English weddung meant a betrothal — the pledge to marry — and the word is simply wed with -ing on the end. Middle Dutch had weddinghe for the same idea.
Middle English
weddynge
English, today
wedding
From Middle English weddynge. From Middle English wedding, weddynge, from Old English weddung (“betrothal, espousal”), equivalent to wed + ing. Cognate with Middle Dutch weddinghe.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA