Kinds of meat - Synonyms and other related words in the Thesaurus and the British English Dictionary - Cambridge Dictionary Cambridge dictionaries logo. Cambridge Dictionary.
In many traditions and statutes of civil or religious law, the consummation of a marriage, often called simply consummation, is the first (or first officially credited) act of sexual intercourse between two people, either following their marriage to each other or after a prolonged sexual attraction.
Massachusetts construes the term civil marriage to mean the voluntary union of two persons as spouses . . . . See Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 440 Mass. 309, 343 (2003). Thus the term marriage includes same-sex marriage, and the term spouse includes partners in a same-sex marriage.