An unfaithful partner. Coined, as far as the record shows, by Shakespeare in The Winter's Tale — for a woman who was innocent.
What it really means
A bedswerver is an unfaithful partner — someone who swerves from the marriage bed. It is a precise piece of imagery: not a fall, but a veering off the road.
It comes from Shakespeare. In The Winter's Tale, King Leontes, eaten up by sudden jealousy, denounces his wife Hermione in front of the court. He calls her an adulteress and a traitor, and then reaches for something worse: she is, he says, a bed-swerver.
Here is the part the lists leave out. Hermione is innocent. She has done nothing at all. The entire play turns on the damage done by a jealous man's certainty — the loss of a son, a daughter abandoned, sixteen years of grief — and the word bedswerver is one of the weapons he uses to do it.
So the first bedswerver on record was not a cheat. She was a woman falsely accused by a husband who would not listen.
By the time Halliwell wrote it into his dictionary in 1847, the context had fallen away and only the definition was left: An adultress. Shak. Which is how words lose their stories — and why this one is worth telling with its story attached.
Where it comes from
The image is exact: not falling, but veering off course.
Myths & misconceptions
The first bedswerver was an unfaithful partner.
The first one on record was not. In The Winter's Tale, Leontes hurls the word at his wife Hermione in a fit of jealousy — and the play is built on the fact that she is entirely innocent.
How it connects
- Mooncalfthe other word on the list with Shakespeare in its history.
Questions people ask
- Did Shakespeare invent bedswerver?
- It appears in The Winter's Tale, and dictionaries credit it to Shakespeare — Halliwell's 1847 entry simply reads 'An adultress. Shak.'
- Who is called a bed-swerver in The Winter's Tale?
- Hermione, the queen, by her husband Leontes. His jealousy is groundless: she has done nothing.