When the Supreme Court handed down its 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges — the case in which the Court pronounced a constitutional right to same-sex marriage — everyone knew it would have far-reaching ramifications. Soon after, in the 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop case, the Court was asked to decide whether a vendor could refuse, on religious grounds, to create a custom-made product for a gay wedding. Because of an intricately narrow ruling, we still don’t know the answer to that question.

To harmless drudges — also known as lexicographers — other tricky questions arose. How do we define marriage? From time immemorial, it had been defined as the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife. Some dictionaries called it the mutual relation of husband and wife. Congress had gone so far as to enact allied definitions into federal law in the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. The Supreme Court invalidated key parts of that statute in 2013 and then dismantled it altogether in the Obergefell decision.

Hence the old definition instantly became, as a legal matter, obsolete. So did the phrase husband and wife — if by using that phrase one meant to encompass all married couples.

There used to be mild discord over the even older phrase man and wife, which was a loan translation of the Latin vir et uxor. Why “man and wife”? That makes about as much sense as “husband and woman.” That is, why give the generic term for one sex but the marital status of the other? And so, especially in the latter half of the 20th century, some people considered it progressive to use husband and wife instead of man and wife.

But as progressivism moves on, what was once considered progressive can become objectionable.

As chief editor of Black’s Law Dictionary, I had revised the definition of marriage by the 2014 tenth edition. Some states had already approved same-sex marriages. So I rewrote the main definition as “the legal union of a couple as spouses,” going on to note the three legal prerequisites: legal capability, mutual consent, and a legally prescribed contract. Nothing about gender there.

Ordinarily, a lexicographer must wait for a usage to become prevalent before recording it. But that’s not true with husband–wife terminology: When the law of the land changed, so did a slew of legal doctrines that could no longer be defined in the traditional terms.

If the new definition of marriage was straightforward, related terms were less so. Essentially, the terms husband and wife had to be changed, with some frequency, to the hypernym spouse — and the full phrase husband and wife had to be almost uniformly (except in historical contexts) changed to the plural spouses.

Just now I called spouse a hypernym. That’s an umbrella term or genus word that covers various species. Spouse is to husband as vehicle (another hypernym) is to car. Spouse is also a word traditionally associated with law — not ordinary conversation.

Both husband and wife date from the Old English period (ca. 600–1150). The word husband is thought to be of Scandinavian origin, along with such important words as are, she, and they. Husband’s correlative — wife — is, like most Old English words, of Germanic origin.

Spouse, by contrast, derives from Norman French in the Middle English period. In English-language literary sources, it’s been traced back to about 1200 — more than a century after the Norman Conquest. Like many linguistic imports from France, it doesn’t have the same emotional resonance as the more specific Anglo-Saxon terms. Spouse has little potential for poignancy in comparison with husband and wife, just as the French loanword residence can hardly compare in vibrancy to the Old English home.

For that reason, perhaps, it’s uncommon for a married person to use the phrase my spouse. Same-sex married couples, like other married folks, tend to use my husband or my wife. To say “My spouse is cooking dinner” is almost to suggest that you don’t much look forward to it.

What’s objectionable today isn’t a reference to a particular husband or wife. It’s the suggestion that husbands must have wives, and wives husbands.

The definition of wife has needed a change. Formerly “a woman who has a lawful husband living,” it is now “a woman who has a lawful spouse living.” A similar change has occurred with husband.

There are other dictionary troubles: The old husband–wife immunity, by which one spouse cannot sue the other for a tort, suddenly becomes obsolete. It must seemingly make way for what had been a secondary variant: interspousal immunity. On the other hand, it’s tricky: By the time same-sex marriage had the sanction of law, most states had abolished the immunity. So it’s mostly a historical relic dating from the old days of exclusively heterosexual marriages. What to do? To quote the old King of Siam, it’s a puzzlement.

Some of the needed transformations can surprise. Marital rape is traditionally defined as “a husband’s sexual intercourse with his wife by force or without her consent.” Now that might become “nonconsensual sexual intercourse committed with force by one spouse against the other.” This might or might not have been legally tested, but there’s nothing in the law to confine the terminology to heterosexual contexts.

Even the definitions of widow and widower will have to change. Traditionally a widow is a woman whose husband has died and who has not remarried; a widower is a man whose wife has died and who has not remarried. In the modern era, those definitions must replace husband and wife with spouse.

“You’re just caving to political correctness!” someone might object. No. Not at all. As chief editor, I’m simply adjusting the definitions to reflect current legal doctrine — about which I must be professionally agnostic.

Husbands and wives will be with us forever. It’s just that they no longer necessarily go together like, say, love and marriage. Or, for that matter, a horse and carriage.