fornication

1. 1.

   voluntary sexual intercourse between persons not married to each other

   Broaderextramarital sex
2. 2.

   extramarital sex that willfully and maliciously interferes with marriage relations

   “adultery is often cited as grounds for divorce”

   Synonymsadulterycriminal conversation

   Broaderextramarital sex

Other forms of fornication

plural

fornications·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about fornication

What does fornication mean?

fornication means "voluntary sexual intercourse between persons not married to each other". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in fornication?

fornication has 5 syllables: for-ni-ca-ti-on. The stress falls on "ti".

What is another word for fornication?

Close synonyms include adultery, criminal conversation. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is fornication a common word?

fornication is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.