A child born out of wedlock.
1805. Eugenia de Acton, Nuns of Desert, II. 10. Miss Blenheim being, what in that country is denominated, a love-child.
1820. Shelley, Hymn to Mercury, xxxviii. 6. And where the ambrosial nymph … Bore the Saturnian’s love-child, Mercury.
1889. G. D. Leslie, Lett. to Marco, xxi. (1893), 140. Many of the little children … called themselves ‘love children.’ ‘Please, sir, she’s a love child.’
1894. Froude, Erasmus, i. 2. Legend says that Erasmus was what is called a love-child.
¶ allusively.
1829. Hull Packet, 24 Feb., 4/2. The [Guardian] society was a sort of love-child of his own.
1884. Symonds, Shaks. Predecessors, xv. 618. No sane critic will maintain that the ‘Jew of Malta’ was a love-child of its maker’s genius.]
