romantic
Meaning
Conducive to or characterized by the expression of love
Of, characterized by, or suggestive of an idealized, sentimental, or fantastic view of reality
Of or relating to the artistic and literary movement of Romanticism
A person with romantic beliefs or attitudes
Structure
Usage
They had a romantic dinner by candlelight.
She has a romantic notion of life in the countryside.
The poet is a key figure of the Romantic period.
Etymology
The word 'romantic' originates from the Old French term 'romanz', which referred to vernacular stories written in the language descended from Latin (Romance), as opposed to scholarly Latin. These stories were often tales of chivalry and adventure, leading to the association with the imaginative and the fantastical. By the 17th century, 'romantic' in English described landscapes that evoked the picturesque, wild quality of such tales, and later, by the 18th century, it came to describe feelings of idealized love and sentimentality akin to those in the stories. The term was later adopted to label the 19th-century artistic movement, Romanticism, which championed emotion, individualism, and the awe of nature, thus completing its journey from a descriptor of a language genre to a broad aesthetic and emotional category.
Analysis
- roman: From Latin Romanicus (Roman), via Old French romanz (in the Roman language, a vernacular story). Its functional role is to provide the core semantic concept of a narrative or story. - tic: A suffix of Greek origin (via Latin -ticus, Greek -tikos), used to form adjectives meaning "pertaining to" or "characterized by".