marry [ME] Both marry and marriage [ME] come from Old French marier ‘to marry’, which goes back to Latin maritus ‘a husband’, source also of marital [E17th]. Traditional advice on marriage includes marry in haste and repent at leisure, from the late 16th century, and never marry for money, but marry where money is, first formulated in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘Northern Farmer, New Style’ (1870). A marriage of convenience is one concluded to achieve a practical purpose. The essayist Joseph Addison used the expression in the early 18th century, translating French mariage de convenance. Whatever the married state, we have been assured since the mid 16th century that marriages are made in heaven, and since the mid 17th that marriage is a lottery. It is typical of the way we use words from different sources in English that we speak of a marriage, from French, in the abstract, but when we talk of the actual, concrete celebrations we usually use wedding, which has been in use since Anglo-Saxon times going back to a Germanic root meaning ‘to pledge’.