The status of being born to parents who were not married

Usage examples of illegitimacy.

Bertha derived her female descent from the Carlovingian line, every step was polluted with illegitimacy or vice.

Recognized as a Medici by Lorenzo, but despised by Piero and Alfonsina because of his illegitimacy, Giulio could make a place for himself only through one of his cousins.

As they depict him in their fevered treatises on illegitimacy, white-slave trading and ophthalmia neonatorum, the average male adult of the Christian and cultured countries leads a life of gaudy lubricity, rolling magnificently from one liaison to another, and with an almost endless queue of ruined milliners, dancers, charwomen, parlour-maids and waitresses behind him, all dying of poison and despair.

This cold castle of stone had been my home once, and despite the illegitimacy of my birth, the Farseers were my family.

In a world increasingly awash with illegitimate children, he increasingly resented his own illegitimacy, referring to it ill-temperedly on inappropriate occasions and denigrating the father who, for all his haste into bed with Alicia, had accepted Gervase publicly always as his son, and given him his surname with legal adoption.

Despite overwhelming evidence of the incredible destructiveness of illegitimacy on every possible axis—crime, poverty, social pathology, welfare dependency, education—liberals will not relent in their glamorization of single motherhood.

His illegitimacy should have been an unsurmountable barrier, but even at a young age Niall had been tall and proud, intelligent, cunning, ruthless, a born leader.