widow's weeds

widow's weeds

The black dress and veil traditionally worn by a widow while mourning the death of her husband. The formidable matriarch remained in her widow's weeds for years after the death of her husband, the late Don Salvatore.
See also: weed
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

widow's weeds

Female mourning costume. The word “weed” comes from an Old English word for “garment.” As a phrase to wear widow's weeds simply means to be in mourning. Many cultures have had or still have a custom of wearing distinctive clothing to mark a husband's death. In Victorian England, for example, a widow wore black for the first year and a day, then moved through dark purple and other somber colors to lighter shades. However, the queen who gave her name to the era wore no other color than black after the death of her beloved husband Prince Albert. Many widows in many Mediterranean countries, most notable Greece and southern Italy, wear black for the rest of their lives.
See also: weed
Endangered Phrases by Steven D. Price
See also:
  • take the veil
  • draw a veil over, to
  • worn up
  • white-collar worker
  • veil
  • beyond the veil
  • white-collar
  • cross-dress
  • cross-dressing
  • worn
References in periodicals archive
[79] The humanistic decorum demanded of women in the royal complaintes and coded in terms of silence, bodily restraint, widow's weeds, and confinement to the home, served not just to banish the "loud and indecent wailing, horrible keening, and holy altars shak[ing] with the wailing of women once complained about by Petrarch and to remove women from the public rituals of mourning once dominated by them, but to remove women from public life more generally.
Female Complaintes: Laments of Venus, Queens, and City Women in Late Sixteenth-Century France [*]
Black as jet, it did not shine in the light either, thus creating the perfect 'widow's weeds'.
Midlands archive: The town that got weaving; Chris Upton looks at the rise of carpet making in Kidderminster and, below, Ross Reyburn reports pn the current trends
If you've already blown your wad on widow's weeds, I hope you saved the sales slips, because this is one husband with the will power and common sense to make this the world's first one-man "lite" cruise.
Anniversary cruise
In either case, it is clear that the call to leave behind their widow's weeds and be dressed anew in glory and justice was issued through the intervention of God.
Who are you wearing?
The squawking, period-appropriate voices and faux-Fosse moves of the chorus girls seem to mock self-satisfied Joey, notably as they parade around in slutty widow's weeds in "Happy Hunting Horn."
Pal Joey
She may have spent her latter years in widow's weeds, but her subjects were engaging in debauchery on a scale not witnessed since the fall of Rome.
David Banks: Victorian values? They were at it like rabbits
SHE may be wearing widow's weeds - but Angela Harris has a more sinister reason for bidding her husband Tommy a final farewell.
Corrie killer's mum buries clue
And donning the widow's weeds that Victoria wore from the day her husband died, Prunella takes the part of the Queen looking back over her life through the words of her journals and letters.
Television: Pick of the box: Yes, we really are amused
Tonight however, you can see Prunella don a prosthetic nose and the widow's weeds to portray the Vicster in a series of reconstructions.
Tonight's Television: QUEEN Victoria
Even her daughter's wedding, in July 1962, was conducted, in dress and solemnity, as if it were a funeral, and Victoria wore her widow's weeds for Prince Edward's wedding in the following year.
A Queen's first shy flight from grief; Midlands millennium Wolverhampton played a key role in Queen Victoria's return to public life. Chris Upton recalls the event, while, below, Ross Reyburn investigates contemporary traces of the great day
Even in passion-killing widow's weeds, Kitty Aldridge somehow stayed sexy AND not so prude in a snood (that's a medieval hairnet - watch for it in Call My Bluff).
I love this monky business; LANNING on the box
Only the occasional food shortages, the price of coal and the fogs, which crept into the crannies on winter nights and grew as thick as a widow's weeds to blacken the town, touched the times gone by.
The crazy ideas of the young
Bathed in Peter Mumford's exquisite lighting--a Rembrandtesque gold to match the warmth of the quietly acknowledged love between Ursula and Vincent in act one, a chilly mix of shadows for the play's somber final minutes--Higgins' face expresses even the slightest changes in feeling with remarkable subtlety and clarity, keeping us aware of the roiling heart beneath the black linen widow's weeds. But to admire acting on a moment-by-moment basis is also to be aware of it.
Genius glimmers through London fog
I'M in mourning, clad in widow's weeds, for the first series of the magnificent Six Feet Under is dead and buried.
TV WITH Frances Traynor; DEAD ON HIS BEAT
After the death of her husband in February, 1952, she scorned thoughts of withdrawal into widow's weeds as tradition seemed almost to dictate.
FROM A QUEEN TO OUR QUEEN MUM