Romantic

How to spell romantic

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce romantic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does romantic mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to love or to the expression of strong affection between people.
2. adjectiveMarked by an idealised, imaginative view of things that may be impractical.

Romantic in a sentence

• He planned a romantic dinner for their anniversary.

• His romantic notion of quitting work to sail the world worried his family.

• The quiet beach made a romantic setting for the proposal.

• They had a romantic image of country living that the cold winters soon corrected.

Where does romantic come from?

Language of origin: French

The word traces back to the Old French romanz, which described a story written in the everyday Romance vernacular rather than in scholarly Latin; that term itself grew from the Latin Romanicus, meaning 'in the Roman manner'. Because such tales were typically full of chivalry, adventure, and idealised love, the noun romance came to suggest the imaginative and the emotional rather than the factual. English borrowed the adjective form in the 1600s, partly through the French romantique, first to mean 'like the old romances', that is fanciful and unrealistic, and only later settling on the warm, love-centred sense we use today. The same root gave us the literary and artistic Romantic movement of the late 1700s, which prized feeling and imagination over cold reason. The spelling keeps the steady roman- core throughout, so anyone who can spell 'Rome' and 'romance' already holds the hard part of the word.

How the word is built

• roman- (from romance, a vernacular tale of love and adventure)
• -tic (adjective-forming suffix)