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sonnet

UK/ˈsɒnɪt/US/ˈsɒnɪt/
nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,369 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: sonnets

A sonnet is the strict fourteen-line poem Shakespeare made famous. Write a sonnet, a Shakespearean sonnet, sonnet eighteen.

Two forms dominate: the Italian, which turns after eight lines, and the English, which saves the turn for a closing couplet. The tightness is the point — the form makes a poet find the argument rather than wander. Shakespeare wrote a hundred and fifty-four.

William Shakespeare · Public domain

Definitions of sonnet

  1. 1nounsonnetA strict fourteen-line poem.B2+

    “He wrote her a sonnet for Valentine's Day, full of love and roses.”

sonnet is a poem.

Where it comes from

Italian sonetto means a little song, from suono, a sound, from Latin sonus. Petrarch fixed the form.

  1. Latin

    sonus — sound

  2. Old Occitan

    sonet — a song

  3. Italian

    sonetto

  4. Middle French

    sonnet

  5. English, today

    sonnet

Built from

  • son · Old Occitan — song, sound

Borrowed from Middle French sonnet, from Italian sonetto, from Old Occitan sonet (“a song”), diminutive of son (“song, sound”), from Latin sonus (“sound”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Music, Art & Culture

Practise this word

sonnet in the wild

  • A sonnet is a fixed poetic form with a structure traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set rhyming scheme.

    Sonnet

  • William Shakespeare wrote sonnets on a variety of themes.

    Shakespeare's sonnets

  • When discussing or referring to Shakespeare's sonnets, it is almost always a reference to the 154 sonnets that were first published all together in a quarto in 1609.

    Shakespeare's sonnets

  • Because of the structure of Italian, the rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet is more easily fulfilled in that language than in English.

    Petrarchan sonnet

  • Sonnet 2 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.

    Sonnet 2

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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.