Word of the Day

: June 21, 2012

amative

adjective AM-uh-tiv

What It Means

1 : strongly moved by love and especially sexual love

2 a : indicative of love

b : of or relating to love

amative in Context

"At the university he became involved with two pretty students, Belene and Allene Ashby, daughters of a Texas rancher, and, amative as ever, he conducted love affairs with both at once." - From John Pearson's 2011 book Painfully Rich: J. Paul Getty and His Heirs

"She claimed to have been tutored in the amative arts by an angel named Soph, the spirit of a deceased suitor she had once spurned."- From a book review by Mathew N. Schmalz in Commonweal, May 6, 2011

Did You Know?

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…." Elizabeth Barrett Browning came up with eight ways to express her love in her poem; we offer six ways, or rather six words, to describe those expressions of love. Besides the familiar "amorous" and today's "amative," there's "amatory," "amoristic," "amatorious," and "amatorial." (You have to go to our unabridged dictionary to look up those last two.) What we love about this list is that all the words stem from Latin "amare," meaning "to love." "Amative," which was first introduced in 1636, was modeled on Medieval Latin "amativus," from the past participle of "amare." "Amorous," on the other hand, goes back to Middle English and came from Medieval Latin "amorosus," an adjective based on the noun "amor" ("love").