memoirs devoted to accounts of his amours
in her memoirs the diva candidly recalls her amours with some of opera's best-known tenors and baritones
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Audio amour From animal encounters to Chance Encounters, CNN Travel’s hit series about love and friendship is now a new CNN podcast.—Maureen O'Hare, CNN, 20 Feb. 2025 Venus in Aries is a force to be reckoned with regarding both matters of amour and of money.—Lisa Stardust, refinery29.com, 31 Jan. 2025 More poignant is the revelation that, despite being the writer of dozens of anthemic love songs, Warren has no great amour of her own.—Glenn Kenny, New York Times, 9 Jan. 2025 The result is at once a ghost story, a tale of amour fou, a settling of accounts, and, one senses, a deeply personal act of expiation.—Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker, 11 Oct. 2024 See All Example Sentences for amour
Word History
Etymology
Middle English amour, amoure "affection, love between the sexes, spiritual love," borrowed from Anglo-French amur, amour, ameur (also continental Old French), going back to Latin amōr-, amor "affection, liking, love, sexual passion, illicit or homosexual passion," from am-, base of amāre "to have affection for, love, be in love, make love to" + -ōr-, -or, abstract noun suffix (going back to *-ōs) — more at amateur
Note:
The regular outcome of Latin amor in modern French should be *ameur, not amour, and the discrepancy has been explained in a number of ways: as re-formation after the adjective amoureux "amorous"; as due to the influence of Anglo-French; as the outcome of -ō- in the dialect of medieval eastern Champagne, a significant courtly center; as a semantic split, ameur being restricted to the sense "rutting season of ungulates"; as due to the influence of ecclesiastical Latin. Probably the most popular hypothesis sees amour as a borrowing from Old Occitan, due to the influence of troubador verse. — Both the current modern meanings and the English pronunciation with stress on the second syllable are presumably due to reborrowing from French.
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