platonic love
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.20 in modern English
19
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
3
Syllables
10
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "The practice of Platonic love, of which he had formed ſo fine an idea in ſpeculation, appeared to him but a chimera in reality."
- "Ye ſanctified and holy, / Who methodiſtically prove / The force of true---Platonic love, / Indulge for once with Scholey."
- "One heart, but in two bodies join’d, / By ancient writers is defin’d, / A friend in truth to prove; / To me ſhe’s preſent when away, / My tender thoughts with Delia ſtay; / Is this Platonic love?"
- "Homosexual appetites, tastes, and fantasies, one is reminded while listening to Elliot, appear to be every bit as various as heterosexual ones, with the range of homosex—running from an almost Platonic love to sadistic lust—being no less wide than that of heterosex."
- "I didn’t know I loved the earth / can someone who hasn’t worked the earth love it / I’ve never worked the earth / it must be my only Platonic love"
- "Passion, providence, and imitation are conventionally the respective ruling forces of these three processes. Yet to take them at face value, as an innocent reading of the poem might advise, would be to betray Garcilaso’s own efforts, in this sonnet and elsewhere, to expose the arbitrariness of grandiose idealist concepts such as Platonic love and providential history."
Etymology
Attested 1636 in Platonic Lovers by William Davenant. Earlier coined in Latin in the 15th century as amor platōnicus by Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino (originally in 1476 letter to Alamanno Donati, later expounded in De amore (1484)), based on his interpretation of the Symposium by Plato, specifically the speech by Socrates, relating the thoughts of Diotima of Mantinea.