monkey's wedding
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.58 in modern English
29
Scrabble Score
14
Letters
3
Syllables
11
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A sun shower.
Example Sentences
- ""Hullo, there's a monkey's wedding," said my wife's niece, a girl of about twenty, born in South Africa […] She was looking out on the lawn, and it was one of those lovely April mornings with sunshine and rain alternating[…]"
- "She went on to supply a series of vague remarks until he was not listening: that […] the rain that afternoon had been a real monkey's wedding, half storm, half sunshine."
- ""Look, it's a monkey's wedding!" Ba exclaimed, using a well-known South African expression referring to rain and sunshine occurring at the same time, and admiring the eerie effect of rain falling through a burst of sunshine."
Etymology
Perhaps patterned after the Portuguese casamento de rapôsa, literally "vixen's wedding", used in the same sense. The Portuguese phrase may have been changed to casamento de macaco, "monkey's wedding", in Portugal's southern African colonies. Alternatively, it may have entered South African English from the Zulu phrase umshado we zinkawu, which literally means "wedding for monkeys".