Meaning
Of a husband or male partner: continually nagged, bossed, or dominated at home, so that his own wishes count for little. Now dated and stereotyped, used mostly jokingly, self-deprecatingly, or in historical description. The verb henpeck means to nag in this way. Dated and built on a gender stereotype; today mostly historical, jocular, or self-deprecating. Regional use: General English.
Origin
From the barnyard image of a hen pecking: the adjective hen-pecked, said of a husband ruled by his wife's superior force of will, is first recorded in 1660 (The Devils Cabinet-Counsell, per the OED) and is generally dated to the 1670s, with the verb henpeck following in the 1680s as an apparent back-formation. The joke was already stock by Samuel Butler's day; his Genuine Remains (1759) verse has 'The henpect Man rides behind his Wife, and lets her wear the Spurs and govern the Reins'. The word postdates Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1590-92), which dramatizes exactly the browbeaten-husband archetype without using it, and related imagery was current earlier still: 'hen' had meant a timid person since the fifteenth century, and English folk rituals such as the skimmington ride publicly mocked dominated husbands. The 'Shrew-era' anchor is therefore thematic rather than lexical - the word itself crystallized in the mid-seventeenth century.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- henpecked husband
- to henpeck someone
Usage Examples
- The memoir paints his father as a henpecked man whose suggestions never survived the dinner table.
- Punch filled its pages with henpecked husbands for half a century.
- Far from henpecked, my grandfather insisted that he and my grandmother ran the farm as equals.