Wergeld

//ˈwɛəɡɛld// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Blood money, the monetary value assigned to a person, set according to their rank, used to determine the compensation paid by the perpetrator of a crime to the victim in the case of injury or to the victim's kindred in the case of homicide; such a reparative payment or compensation. countable, especially, historical, uncountable

    "The first law we find is one of Æthelbirht's:—"if a freeman lie with a freeman's wife, let him pay for it with his 'wer-geld,' and provide another wife with his own money, and bring her to the other.""

Synonyms

All synonyms
wer

Example

More examples

"The first law we find is one of Æthelbirht's:—"if a freeman lie with a freeman's wife, let him pay for it with his 'wer-geld,' and provide another wife with his own money, and bring her to the other.""

Etymology

Learned borrowing from Old English werġeld, wereġeld (“compensation for a man killed”), from Proto-West Germanic *werageld. More at wer, geld.

Related phrases

blood moneylex frisionum

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.