Cuckold

In biology, a cuckold is a male who unwittingly invests parental effort in juveniles who are not genetically his offspring.

[4] The word often implies that the husband is deceived; that he is unaware of his wife's unfaithfulness and may not know until the arrival or growth of a child plainly not his (as with cuckoo birds).

Rabelais's Tiers Livers of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1546) portrays a horned fool as a cuckold.

[11] In Molière's L'École des femmes (1662), a man named Arnolphe (see below) who mocks cuckolds with the image of the horned buck (becque cornu) becomes one at the end.

In Chinese usage, the cuckold (or wittol) is said to be "戴綠帽子" dài lǜmàozi, translated into English as 'wearing the green hat'.

The term is an allusion to the sumptuary laws used from the 13th to the 18th centuries that required males in households with prostitutes to wrap their heads in a green scarf (or later a hat).

[15] This is alluded to in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, and others.

[23][page needed][24][25][26] The dominant man engaging with the cuckold's partner is called a "bull".

The Jealous Husband (1847), a genre painting by Cornelius Krieghoff depicting a cuckolded husband
A reed warbler raising the chick of a common cuckoo ; the term "cuckold" is derived from the cuckoo's tendency to lay eggs in the nests of other birds.
c. 1815 French satire on cuckoldry, which shows both men and women wearing horns
"The Cuckold Carpenter Under the Bed of his Wife and her Lover" from an 18th-century edition of the Kalīla wa-Dimna