Bride price also known as bride wealth is an amount of money or property or wealth “paid” to the parents of a woman for the right to marry their daughter. (Compare dowry, which is paid to the groom, or used by the bride to help establish the new household, and dower, which is property settled on the bride by the groom at the time of marriage.)
In the anthropological literature bride price has often been explained in market terms, as payment made in “exchange” for the bride’s family’s loss of her labor and fertility within her kin group. Compare this affinal practice with brideservice, which does not rely on a compensatory “exchange” idiom for ethnological interpretation. The bride price is usually paid before the wedding.