suttee

[ suh-tee, suht-ee ]

noun

1. sati.

suttee

/ sʌˈtiː; ˈsʌtiː /

noun

1. the former Hindu custom whereby a widow burnt herself to death on her husband's funeral pyre
2. a Hindu widow who immolated herself in this way

Derived Forms

• sutˈteeism, noun

Other Words From

• sut·teeism noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of suttee¹

C18: from Sanskrit satī virtuous woman, from sat good

Example Sentences

“Indeed it was: I had as good a right to die when my time came as he had: but I should bide that time, and not be hurried away in a suttee.”

From Literature

It is believed that widows have gathered in the city since Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, a 16th-century Bengali social reformer, brought a group of them there to escape from suttee, a now-banned practice in which Hindu widows immolated themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres.

From New York Times

“Say, what’re you doing today, anyhow? All dressed up and mooning around like the prologue to a suttee. Did you go to Psychology this morning?”

From Literature

One of the most disturbing poems here is Suttee, his record of Plath’s emergence as a poet, in which Hughes casts himself as a midwife delivering an “explosion / Of screams” and before being “engulfed / In a flood, a dam-burst thunder / Of a new myth”, a birth that “sucked the oxygen out of both of us”.

From The Guardian

When the case is appealed to the Supreme Court, as expected, it will rank among a handful of decisions defining when the state should interfere with religious practice — most memorably, the 1987 act that banned glorification of suttee, an outlawed ritual in which widows climbed onto their husbands’ funeral pyres and were burned to death.

From New York Times