scarlet letter
English
Noun
scarlet letter (plural scarlet letters)
- (historical) The letter "A" in scarlet cloth required to be worn by those convicted of adultery in 17th-century Puritan New England.
- 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter:
- The Scarlet Letter [title]
- 2012, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, Penguin, published 2013, page 44:
- In the early seventeenth century, all the colonies of New England enacted harsh laws against unchastity: banishment, imprisonment, severe public flogging, the wearing of scarlet letters and other shaming garments for the rest of one's life.
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