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platonic-love

Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.

Letters

13 characters

Language

English

word origin

Source

Wiktionary

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Detailed reference entry for the English word "platonic-love", 13-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "platonic-love" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "platonic-love" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.

platonic love is aEnglishnoun. It means: Intimate but non-sexual and non-romantic affection.

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Key facts for platonic love
PropertyValue
Headwordplatonic love
LanguageEnglish
Part of speechNoun
Letters13
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

platonic love is not present in the top-100,000 ranked English corpus, typical for technical, archaic, or low-frequency vocabulary.

Source: Wordfreq corpus

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for platonic love is 13 letters long, classified as anoun. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Intimate but non-sexual and non-romantic affection.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for platonic love in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Attested 1636 in Platonic Lovers by William Davenant. Earlier coined in Latin in the 15th century as amor platonicus by Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino (originally in 1476 letter to Alamanno Donati, later expounded in De amore (1484)), based on his inter… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is platonic love, spelled P-L-A-T-O-N-I-C- -L-O-V-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Intimate but non-sexual and non-romantic affection.

Etymology

Attested 1636 in Platonic Lovers by William Davenant. Earlier coined in Latin in the 15th century as amor platonicus 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.

This word in other languages

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "platonic love"?
"platonic love" is spelled P-L-A-T-O-N-I-C- -L-O-V-E.
What does "platonic love" mean?
As a noun, "platonic love" means: Intimate but non-sexual and non-romantic affection.
What is the origin of the word "platonic love"?
Attested 1636 in Platonic Lovers by William Davenant. Earlier coined in Latin in the 15th century as amor platonicus by Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino (originally in 1476 letter to Alamanno Donati, later expounded in De amore (1484)), based on... See the full etymology section above for more details.
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Data Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Frequency data from Wordfreq. Misspellings derived from Hunspell dictionaries.