love

UK/ˈlʌv/US/ˈlʌv/

nounA15 meanings One of the most common words in English · #32 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: loved, loves, loving

Love is the strongest warm feeling you can have for another person, the pull towards someone you would rearrange your life for. Your mother, your partner, the friend you would drive three hours for at two in the morning.

Love does more work as a verb than as a noun: you love your family, and you also love mangoes and love this song. I'd love to is the warm way to say yes to an invitation. In Britain love is a friendly word for a stranger, thanks, love, from a bus driver, which catches out learners who expect romance in it. In tennis it means zero, a score of nothing at all. Watch the small words around it: you are in love with someone, you fall in love, you make love, and love letters, love songs and first love all sit on the romantic side.

Definitions of love

1nounloveA deep, warm feeling of care for another person.A1~19%
“Her love for her grandchildren showed in everything she cooked.”
synonyms: affection, devotion
2nounstrongStrong romantic feeling for someone.A1~39%
“They were still in love after forty years of marriage.”
3verbaffectionTo feel deep affection for someone.A1~2%
“I love you more than I know how to say.”
4verbverbTo like something very much.A1~2%
“She loves swimming in the sea, even in October.”
5nountennisIn tennis, a score of zero.B2~38%
“She took the first game to love.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

love is a feeling.

Phrases it lives in

fall in love — to start loving someone romantically
the love of your life — the person you love most, and for good
no love lost between them — they dislike each other

Where it comes from

Love is one of the oldest words in the language, running back through Old English lufu and Proto-Germanic *lubō to the Proto-Indo-European root *lewbʰ-, "love, care, desire". English once had the borrowed French word amour alongside it, and love pushed it aside. The Love at the bottom of a letter is a shortening of with love.

Proto-Indo-European
*lewbʰ-
Middle English
love
English, today
love

From Middle English love. From Middle English love, luve, from Old English lufu, from Proto-West Germanic lubu, from Proto-Germanic lubō, from Proto-Indo-European lewbʰ- (“love, care, desire”). The close of a letter sense is presumably a truncation of With love or the like.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Feelings & Character

Practise this word

love in the wild

An example of this range of meanings is that the love of a mother differs from the love of a spouse, which differs from the love for food.
Love
The color wheel theory of love defines three primary, three secondary, and nine tertiary love styles, describing them in terms of the traditional color wheel.
Love
Away from his native Moscow to care for his ailing sister, Laptev falls instantly in love with Yulia Sergeyevna, the daughter of the local doctor.
Three Years
Platonic love is not always mutually exclusive with romance or passion, however.
Platonic love
In the ideal scenario, passionate or romantic love would progress with two people meeting, and developing a mutual attraction.
Unrequited love

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

Definitions of love

1nounloveA deep, warm feeling of care for another person.A1~19%

“Her love for her grandchildren showed in everything she cooked.”

synonyms: affection, devotion

2nounstrongStrong romantic feeling for someone.A1~39%

“They were still in love after forty years of marriage.”

3verbaffectionTo feel deep affection for someone.A1~2%

“I love you more than I know how to say.”

4verbverbTo like something very much.A1~2%

“She loves swimming in the sea, even in October.”

5nountennisIn tennis, a score of zero.B2~38%

“She took the first game to love.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

love is a feeling.