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suitor

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈsuːtə//
  • United Kingdom//ˈsjuːtə//
  • United States//ˈsutɚ//

One who pursues someone, especially a woman, for a romantic relationship or marriage; a wooer; one who falls in love with or courts someone.

noun

  1. 1

    One who pursues someone, especially a woman, for a romantic relationship or marriage; a wooer; one who falls in love with or courts someone.

    (Notice that "Lysias" begins from the realistic assumption that an attractive young man with many suitors will "gratify" one of them, the only question being which. Rightly or wrongly, he treats the question, "Shall I at all?" as already resolved.)

  2. 2

    A person or organization that expresses an interest in working with, or taking over, another.

    […] and Mortimer asserted he had no shortage of suitors ready, willing, and able to make acquisition loans […]

    The Betaville blog wrote earlier this week about market speculation that Adevinta was attracting takeover interest, without naming the suitors.

  3. 3

    A party to a suit or litigation.

  4. 4

    One who sues, petitions, solicits, or entreats; a petitioner.

Etymology

From Middle English sutour, from Anglo-Norman suytour, seuter, from Late Latin secutor (“follower, pursuer”).

verb

  1. 1

    To play the suitor; to woo; to make love.

Forms

plural
suitors
past tense
suitored
past participle
suitored
present participle
suitoring
third person singular
suitors
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).