noun
mass nounThe action of marrying or forming a sexual relationship with a person of a superior sociological or educational background.
‘Family connections help here, and hypergamy (marriage into a higher class) for both men and women is very important.’- ‘All these strata tend to be endogamous or, in the south, observe the marital rule of hypergamy.’
- ‘Hockings and Merchant collaborate in the final essay to examine hypergamy and hypogamy in pre-modern Kerala.’
- ‘Owing to these rules, hypergamy, the marriage of a wealthy woman of lesser status to a man of superior status was not uncommon in the old regime.’
- ‘For historical reasons, women in our culture practice hypergamy, the tendency to marry men of higher status than their own.’
Origin
Late 19th century from hyper-‘above’ + Greek gamos ‘marriage’.
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