amative

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…. Elizabeth Barrett Browning came up with eight ways to express her love in her poem; we offer six ways, or rather six words, to describe those expressions of love. Besides the familiar "amorous" and today's "amative," there's "amatory," "amoristic," "amatorious," and "amatorial." (You have to go to our unabridged dictionary to look up those last two.) What we love about this list is that all the words stem from Latin amare, meaning "to love." "Amative," which was first introduced in 1636, was modeled on Medieval Latin amativus, from the past participle of "amare." "Amorous," on the other hand, goes back to Middle English and came from Medieval Latin amorosus, an adjective based on the noun "amor" ("love").