Sweetheart
nounA person one loves dearly, or an affectionate name used for such a person.
How to spell sweetheart
10 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce sweetheart
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does sweetheart mean?
- nounA person one loves dearly, or an affectionate name used for such a person.
Sweetheart in a sentence
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He wrote a long letter to his sweetheart while working abroad.
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The elderly couple still call each other sweetheart after fifty years.
Where does sweetheart come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
This is a transparent native English compound, joining the adjective 'sweet' (from Old English swete, meaning 'pleasing to the senses') with 'heart' (from Old English heorte, the organ long imagined as the seat of love and feeling). The pairing appears in Middle English around the 1300s, written as two words or as 'swete herte', a tender way of addressing a beloved person. Over time the two halves fused into a single word as the affectionate sense settled. The spelling stays loyal to its parts, so the only real trap is remembering the silent build of 'heart', where the 'ea' sounds like 'ar' and the final 't' rounds it off. The same 'heart' element gives English a whole family of warm compounds such as 'heartfelt' and 'heartbroken'.
How the word is built
- sweet (pleasant, dear)
- heart (the heart as the seat of affection)
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