Words! Words! Words!

Supposedly on this date in A.D. 278, a priest named Valentine lost his head to Emperor Claudius the Cruel for conducting marriage ceremonies in Rome. How’s your love…for words? Take our vocab test and see if Merriam or Webster should have sent you a card today.

1. billet-doux:
   1. a love shack;
   2. a love pat;
   3. a love letter;
   4. a love spat.
2. con amore:
   1. abundant love;
   2. against love;
   3. with love;
   4. false love.
3. eye rhyme:
   1. a musical composition usually for piano suggesting an epic love ballad;
   2. a sonnet;
   3. a game in which one player gives a word or line of verse to be matched in rhyme by other players;
   4. an imperfect rhyme that appears to have identical vowel sounds from similarity of spelling (as move and love).
4. inamorata:
   1. a woman with whom one is in love or has intimate relations;
   2. (capped) an island in the Florida Keys;
   3. dear to the heart;
   4. a nonsense word in the fourth stanza of Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (baby, don’t you know that I love you).
5. Thisbe:
   1. Pluto’s first lover;
   2. a legendary young woman of Babylon who dies for love of Pyramus;
   3. capital city of legendary Demora, the kingdom ruled by King Cupid;
   4. a phrase lacking an object or predicate nominative.
6. timocracy:
   1. government in which love of honor is the ruling principle;
   2. government in which love of duty is the ruling principle;
   3. government in which love of history is the ruling principle;
   4. government in which love of money is the ruling principle.
7. troubadour:
   1. an adventurer engaged in a quest;
   2. a member of a Scandinavian people of southern Sweden to which the legendary hero Beowulf belonged;
   3. one of a class of lyric poets and poet-musicians often of knightly rank who flourished from the 11th to the end of the 13th century chiefly in the south of France and the north of Italy and whose major theme was courtly love;
   4. a folk singer or instrumentalist.
8. omnia vincit amor:
   1. love conquers all;
   2. love endures all;
   3. love outweighs all;
   4. love is futility.
9. amative:
   1. devoid of affection;
   2. amorous;
   3. clinging;
   4. supportive.
10. coquette:
    1. a game in which lovers using mallets drive wooden balls through a series of heart-shaped wickets set out on a lawn;
    2. a small cube of toasted or crisply fried heart-shaped bread;
    3. a pointed or sharpened stake, post, or pale;
    4. a woman who endeavors without sincere affection to gain the attention and admiration of men.

(Source:  Merriam-Webster 11)

Click here for the answers. 

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