Romance

How to spell romance

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce romance

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does romance mean?

1. nounA loving or amorous relationship between people, or the feeling of excitement and affection associated with love.
2. nounA story or genre of fiction dealing with love, often with an emotional and idealised plot.
3. verbTo court someone or try to win their love, often with attentive and flattering gestures.

Romance in a sentence

• noun

  Their office romance became the talk of the whole department.

• noun

  She writes a popular romance that sells thousands of copies each year.

• verb

  He tried to romance her with flowers and handwritten letters.

• noun

  A candlelit dinner added a touch of romance to the evening.

• noun

  The bookshop devotes an entire shelf to romance and crime fiction.

• verb

  The salesman seemed to romance his clients with lavish dinners.

Where does romance come from?

Language of origin: French

The word traces back to the Latin adverb romanice, meaning 'in the Roman manner' or 'in the everyday Roman tongue', as opposed to formal classical Latin. In medieval France this became the Old French romanz, which named the popular spoken language and then, by extension, the stories written in that vernacular rather than in scholarly Latin. Because those vernacular tales were so often about brave knights and their love affairs, the word gradually shifted from meaning 'a story in the common language' to meaning 'a tale of love and adventure', and finally to the modern sense of love itself. English borrowed it in the 1300s, and the same root explains why the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish) and the word 'romantic' all belong to the same family. The silent link to 'Roman' is a useful spelling anchor: keep the o after the r, just as in Rome.

How the word is built

• roman- (from Latin romanicus: in the Roman vernacular)
• -ce (noun suffix)