Cuckold-Hur funkar det?

"Cuckold" is derived from the Old French for the Cuckoo bird, "Cocu" with the pejorative suffix -ald. The earliest written use of the Middle English derivation, “cokewold” occurs in 1250. The females of certain varieties of Cuckoo lay their eggs in other bird’s nests, freeing themselves from the need to nurture the eggs to hatching. In middle age Europe, the law, custom, and the church all defined married women as a category of property held by her husband. Although Christian marriage vows strictly enjoined sexual exclusivity in a marriage for both partners, custom and doctrine rarely enforced it on the husband. A married woman who was unfaithful to her vows made a “cuckoo” of the husband who unknowingly provided her, and potentially her illegitimate offspring, with shelter and protection as a tricked bird does to the cuckoo’s eggs.

A nuance of the word often overlooked in contemporary usage is that it refers to a man who, like the bird warming the cuckoo’s eggs, is unaware of his victimization. A man who knows and acquiesced, in his wife’s taking of another lover is called a “wittol,” itself a derivation from the Middle English for “willing (as in knowing) cuckold.” Willing cuckold is one of the primary fantasies of the female ego. In recent years the word “cuckold,” and its 1589 verb form “cuckolding” have been used to describe various forms of “open” or non-monogamous marriage arrangements that include an element of sado-masochism. “Wittol,” which more exactly describes the males in these situations, has become increasingly rare, although it appears in American and English literature as recently as 1950s.

A currently popular slang extension of the definition of cuckold expands it from married men to any male in a dating or domestic relationship with a woman in which he remains exclusive and she does not. This is the result of the jocular extension of the word "married" to describe paired-up couples in general rather than just those who have official legal sanction. This new usage may also reflect the paucity of established words that describe the variety of alternative sexual and romantic arrangements that have proliferated in recent years.