Meaning of Gretna Green | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A village on the border between England and Scotland (in Dumfries and Galloway council area just inside Scotland), famous for easy marriages (OS grid ref NY3168).
2. Any town with liberal marriage laws, a place where couples elope.

Equivalents

Examples

“The Clown is a London cockney, with a prodigious eye to his own comfort and muffins,—a Lord Mayor's fool, who loved "everything that was good;" and Columbine is the boarding-school girl, ripe for running away with, and making a dance of it all the way from Chelsea to Gretna Green.”

“It was nothing more nor less than to convert all places licensed under the Toleration Act into Gretna Greens, where persons of all persuasions might go and make irregular marriages.”

“Federal Writers Project (1952), West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State, →ISBN, page 485: “A town of narrow streets and smoke-begrimed old buildings, Wellsburg thrived as a Gretna Green for many years””

“The sexual irresponsibility attributed to most gin marriages could not help being linked with the possibility of a sexually transmitted infection that accompanied the couples, untested, to Crown Point, Valparaiso, or other Gretna Greens.”

CEFR level