fiance – podictionary 136
Although the average age of people getting married in North America is creeping upward, people still tend to do it.
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We haven’t yet come up with a universally agreed-upon word to refer to someone we are living with before getting married.
Once you decide though, “yes this is it, we’re going to get married,” the word fiancé becomes available.
Fiancé only lasts a little while until the word husband or wife stuns you by being applicable to your own situation, instead of just to older people.
English speakers have only had fiancés for about 150 years. The word betrothed goes back more like 700 years.
It is easy to see the word truth in the word betrothed and the same lineage of trust applies to the word fiancé.
Even further back, 800 years ago in French, fiancé meant “trust” and came into English first with that meaning.
From “trust” to “promise” is an understandable change in meaning and so the word fiancé turns up again a century or two before Shakespeare. In this case it shows up as a verb so that to fiancé was “to promise” and specifically to promise to wed.
Thus as the verb became obsolete the noun referring to the persons who had exchanged promises arose to take its place.
According to The Oxford English Dictionary the first person to be referred to in writing as someone’s fiancé was Blanche Mary Shore Smith who at the time was engaged to be married to Arthur Hugh Clough.
Since you likely don’t recognize either of those two lovebirds I will mention Blanche’s cousin, whose name you will recognize. Arthur worked for years as unpaid secretary for her.
She was Florence Nightingale.











