Skip to content
Allin

incest

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈɪn.sɛst//

Sexual relations between close relatives, especially immediate family members and sometimes first cousins, usually considered taboo.

noun

  1. 1

    Sexual relations between close relatives, especially immediate family members and sometimes first cousins, usually considered taboo.

    Genetic problems caused by incest are thought to have plagued many royal families in the Middle Ages.

    For a structuralist like Edmund Leach, the structure is the meaning. Genesis, for example, is about incest taboos; all the rest is noise and mystification.

    He was only Craster's whelp, an abomination born of incest, not the son of the King-beyond-the-Wall.

  2. 2

    Romantic relationships between close relatives, also widely taboo.

Etymology

Learned borrowing from Latin incestus. Displaced Old English mǣġhǣmed (literally “relative-sex”). Doublet of inchaste.

verb

  1. 1

    To engage in incestuous sexual activities.

    I do not want anyone to feel that my lesbianism is a result of being incested.

    Her erotic transference ultimately devolved into a revelation that she had been consistently incested by her brother

    […] the most powerful of that bunch of immortal giants called Titans was Cronus, who “incested” with sister Rhea, who then birthed the Olympians (Zeus and his bunch) […]

Forms

plural
incests
past tense
incested
past participle
incested
present participle
incesting
third person singular
incests
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).