octogamy

== English == === Etymology === From octo- +‎ -gamy. Compare Middle English octogamie. === Noun === octogamy (uncountable) The state of having eight spouses simultaneously. 1888, Florence Nightingale, letter to Maude Verney dated 2 February 1888, published in Lynn McDonald, Florence Nightingale: An Introduction to Her Life and Family (2010), page 713: The best wardmaster in Scutari had eight wives—I mean eight wives alive—at different stations. […] He was tried when he came home at Warwick Assizes for what was euphoniously called bigamy, but was octogamy. 2011, Joyce E. Kelley, "Beating them to the Punch: satirizing sensation from the 1860s comic journal to Braddon's The Doctor's Wife", Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, Spring 2011: The author devotes almost an entire page of the essay to rewriting [Mary Elizabeth] Braddon's fiction, replacing bigamy with octogamy and inventing a sensation author who, writing between meals, creates three murderous polygamist heroines in one day--including one who, having poisoned twenty-seven lovers, flies off "to sunny Italy ... with the stable boy." ==== Related terms ==== monogamy bigamy trigamy quadrigamy