dulcinea

[duhl-sin-ee-uh, duhl-suh-nee-uh]

Origin

noun

a ladylove; sweetheart.

Origin:
1740–50; after Dulcinea the ladylove of Don Quixote

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
Cite This Source

Link To dulcinea

00:10

00:09

00:08

00:07

00:06

00:05

00:04

00:03

00:02

00:01

Dulcinea is always a great word to know.

So is ort. Does it mean:

a gadget; dingus; thingumbob.

a scrap or morsel of food left at a meal.

LEARN MORE UNUSUAL WORDS WITH WORD DYNAMO...

Collins

World English Dictionary

dulcinea (ˌdʌlsɪˈnɪə)

—n
	a man's sweetheart

[C18: from the name of Don Quixote's mistress Dulcinea del Toboso in Cervantes' novel; from Spanish dulce sweet]

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
Cite This Source

Etymonline

Word Origin & History

Dulcinea

"sweetheart," 1748, from the name of Don Quixote's mistress in Cervantes' romance, the name a Sp. fem. derivative of L. dulce "sweet."

Word Dynamo Rating For Dulcinea

People who can define Dulcinea may know 45,520 words, as many as a 12th grader.

How many words do you know?

Use Dictionary.com faster without ads >>

Matching Quote

"The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a monster with heads of the lion, the dragon and the goat; the theologians of the second century, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are inextricably tied; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a vermilion supernatural bird, endowed with six feet and four wings, but without a face or eyes; the geometers of the nineteenth century, the hypercube, a figure with four dimensions, which encloses an infinite number of cubes and has as its faces eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this vain museum of horrors: by means of an artistic malignity called dubbing, it proposes monsters that combine the illustrious features of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo."

-Jorge Luis Borges

dulcinea

dul·cin·e·a