Skip to content
OneKitly

romance

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//rə(ʊ)ˈman(t)s//
  • United Kingdom//ˈrəʊman(t)s//
  • United States//roʊˈmæn(t)s//
  • India//roˈmæns//

An intimate relationship between two people; a love affair.

noun

  1. 1

    An intimate relationship between two people; a love affair.

    Everybody's working for the weekend Everybody wants a new romance.

  2. 2

    A strong obsession or attachment for something or someone.

  3. 3

    Idealized love which is pure or beautiful.

  4. 4

    A story, novel, film, etc., centred around an idealized love relationship.

  5. 5

    A story relating to chivalry; a story involving knights, heroes, adventures, quests, etc.

    `Will you undertake the task? We give you complete freedom, and as a reward you will, we believe, have the credit of presenting to the world the most wonderful history, as distinguished from romance, that its records can show.'

  6. 6

    A tale of high adventure.

    Could one have known the past histories of some of the oddly-selected couples who shared everything in common, many a romance might have been written during what, to all outward appearances, was a dull and prosaic time to most lookers-on!

  7. 7

    A mysterious, exciting, or fascinating quality.

    the romance of cruising down the Nile.

    There's a comforting romance to the space—the chalky white walls, the soaring ceilings, the natural light flooding in through the windows, all of which create a warm, flattering glow.

  8. 8

    A literary or filmic genre about idealized love.

  9. 9

    An embellished account of something; an idealized lie.

  10. 10

    An adventure, or series of extraordinary events, resembling those narrated in romances.

    His life was a romance.

  11. 11

    A dreamy, imaginative habit of mind; a disposition to ignore what is real.

    She was so full of romance she would forget what she was supposed to be doing.

  12. 12

    A sentimental piece of music; a romanza.

Etymology

From Middle English romauns, roumance, borrowed from Anglo-Norman and Old French romanz, romans (the vernacular language of France, as opposed to Latin), from Medieval Latin rōmānicē, Vulgar Latin rōmānicē (“in the Roman language”, adverb), from Latin rōmānicus (“roman”, adjective) from rōmānus (“a Roman”). Doublet of Romansch.

verb

  1. 1

    To woo; to court.

    A female Shepard can romance bisexual Yeoman Kelly Chambers, but doing so does not yield a Paramour achievement or an implied sex scene the way that romancing ‘official’ interests does. Similarly, the player can attempt to romance the Asari Samara or her Ardat-Yakshi daughter Morinth, but the former will refuse and sex with the latter will kill Shepard.

    In the ghetto, the gentle Barber romances a defiant washerwoman, Hannah, who is played by Chaplin's wife at the time, Paulette Goddard.

  2. 2

    To write or tell romantic stories, poetry, letters, etc.

  3. 3

    To talk extravagantly and imaginatively; to build castles in the air.

Forms

plural
romances
past tense
romanced
past participle
romanced
present participle
romancing
third person singular
romances
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).