"X's widower"

Douglas G. Wilson douglas at NB.NET
Mon Sep 8 03:20:12 UTC 2008


Of course this has been around for a long time, although less frequent
than "X's widow" for the obvious reasons.

One can search Google Books for "the widower of" and find a large number
of prosaic instances of this construction in the sense under discussion.

If one desires exactly the form with apostrophe-s, one can try (e.g.)
"Mary's widower" and find a few mid-19th-century items referring to the
illustrious Spanish widower of an illustrious British lady.

-- Doug Wilson

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