shotgun wedding meaning (slang): definition

shotgun wedding

noun

Etymology From the implication that the groom was forced to the altar by shotgun-wielding relatives of the bride.

Idiomatic, Slang A wedding in which the bride is already pregnant.

If Red Skelton's joke can still elicit laughs, it is only because there is a minority who can still remember a shotgun wedding and even recall the understandings that lay behind that insistence, now seeming quaint, that a couple sleeping together should really be married.2012, Charles W. Dunn, American Culture in Peril, University Press of Kentucky, →ISBN, page 48:

Idiomatic, Slang A wedding made in haste or under duress.

Idiomatic, Slang Any similarly reputedly forced partnership, between people, organizations, components, or concepts.

But all this fails when we try to have a shotgun wedding between the two great theories of nature, relativity and quantum theory.2021, Michio Kaku, The God Equation: