The word 'dowry' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to the money or property that a bride's family gives to the groom or his family when marriage is taking place. For example: "The groom's family demanded a large dowry for the arranged marriage".
It's one hell of a sum, even if it does include a £450m dowry for TSB's would-be Spanish purchaser, Sabadell, to upgrade the IT systems.
Despite some reforms, reported crimes against women such as rape, dowry deaths, abduction and molestation increased by 26.7% in 2013 compared with the previous year, according to government statistics.
Without more rain, it will fail, adding to his 125,000-rupee ($2,500) debt a big sum, when the dowry for a Lambada bride is $1,200.With no crop, no money and three daughters to marry off, he would join the only reliable flood in AP in these drought days: of thousands of tough, skinny peasants into Hyderabad, the state capital, in search of a day-wage.
But in London there was the familiar nagging feeling that the foreigners had got the bigger dowry.
Noble girls were sent there because it was cheaper and easier than finding a husband for them: the dowry due was sometimes as little as one-tenth of the average marriage-portion in a wealthy house.
Like so many tribes in the region, the Karamajong measure wealth in cows: a man cannot marry without paying a bovine dowry.
By Definition, shareholders of acquired firms are happy with their dowry, or they would not have parted with their shares.
Who wants a gold bar as a dowry?
Until the early 20th century the people on Yap, an island in the Pacific Ocean, used large stone disks (pictured) as money for big expenses, such as a daughter's dowry.
Sex out of wedlock remains taboo, yet the cost of lavish weddings, hefty dowry payments and the bridal requirement of a furnished, paid-for home have pushed the average age of marriage in many Arab countries into the 30s.
A recent analysis by Morgan Stanley, another investment bank, foresaw the shares reaching perhaps $47 if, among other things, American car sales rose again this year.The report also considered a bull case in which the shares soar to $72, but that depended on GM finding someone to take its perpetually loss-making European division, Opel-Vauxhall, off its hands without a dowry.
