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lure

nounverbnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//lɵː//
  • //lʊə//
  • //lɔː//
  • //ljʊə//
  • //ljɔː//

Something that tempts or attracts, especially one with a promise of reward or pleasure.

noun

  1. 1

    figurativeSomething that tempts or attracts, especially one with a promise of reward or pleasure.

    How many have with a smile made small account Of Beauty and her lures

  2. 2

    An artificial bait attached to a fishing line to attract fish.

    the inch-at-a-time flutter of a surface lure

  3. 3

    A bunch of feathers attached to a line, used in falconry to recall the hawk.

    My Faulcon now is ſharpe and paſſing emptie, / And til ſhe ſtoope ſhe muſt not be full gorg'd, / For then ſhe never lookes upon her lure.

  4. 4

    A velvet smoothing brush.

Etymology

From Anglo-Norman lure, from Old French loirre (Modern French leurre), from Frankish *lōþr, from Proto-Germanic *lōþr-, perhaps ultimately related to *laþō (“invitation, calling”), or from Proto-Indo-European *leh₂- (“to hide”). Compare English allure, also from Old French. Probably related to German Luder (“bait”).

verb

  1. 1

    To attract by temptation, appeal, or guile.

    It had been sixteen years since the BBC’s Grace Wyndham Goldie wrote her internal memo about luring him back to make sociological/scientific TV programmes. Now a second note had circulated, from the science department, proposing that he should present the Corporation’s next educative megaseries.

    Professor is what you become after teaching for twenty to thirty years. Research Professor is what you then want to become, so you can finally stop worrying about students and do the research that lured you into academia in the first place!

  2. 2

    To attract fish with a lure.

  3. 3

    To recall a hawk with a lure.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of lurAlternative form of lur.

Etymology

Borrowed from Icelandic lúðr.

Forms

plural
lures
past tense
lured
past participle
lured
present participle
luring
third person singular
lures
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).