Jumping on the Wedding Train

There was some interesting wedding vocabulary in this article in the BBC News today. The first interesting word is in the first paragraph:

A Chinese bride has attempted to break the world record for the longest wedding dress by walking down the aisle in a 2,162m-long (7,083ft) gown.

In this situation, the ‘aisle‘ is the central passage in the wedding venue. We also use it to talk about the passages that you walk up and down in an aeroplane. The worker on the check-in counter at an airport will often ask if you want a ‘window‘ or ‘aisle‘ seat when you check in.

It is mentioned in the second paragraph that the dress was made by the ‘husband-to-be‘. We can use ‘husband-to-be‘ or ‘wife-to-be‘ to talk about people who are going to get married.

In the following paragraph, the author writes:

It took their 200 wedding guests three hours to unroll the fabric and decorate the train with 9,999 silk roses.

The word ‘train‘ in this sentence means the long piece of fabric that trails from the back of the dress.

There is yet another interesting piece of wedding vocabulary just a little later in the article:

So instead, he decided he would use his nuptials to challenge the current wedding dress world record of 1,579m (5,180ft), set in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, on 1 April 2009.

‘Nuptial‘ is a formal adjective for talking about things related to marriage or wedding ceremonies and ‘nuptials‘ is a noun we can use to refer to a wedding celebration or ceremony.

There’s a great phrasal verb in the next paragraph where the author mentions that the family ‘pitched in‘ on the idea. This means that they contributed to or helped with it.

The phrase ‘tied the knot‘ also features in this article. In this case, it means to complete the wedding ceremony.

What do people usually wear for wedding ceremonies in your country?

Today’s photo is by Fran Flores.