Meaning
A former sweetheart, lover or romantic partner, especially one for whom feelings linger. 'Old' marks the affair as past; 'flame' carries the old metaphor in which love is fire and the beloved its flame - the past lover the fire once burned for, and for whom a spark may remain. Often collocates with rekindle, run into and reunite. Do not merge with this site's 'carry a torch for someone' entry - both are love-as-fire metaphors, but the torch names the feeling while an old flame names the person. The Dickens quotation was verified verbatim on Wikisource. Regional use: Standard across British, American and Australian English.
Origin
Love as fire is an old metaphor, and English flame long carried the sense of a sweetheart or passionate lover: Wiktionary records the romantic-partner sense with a citation from Thackeray's Barry Lyndon (1844), 'her old flame'. The fixed compound is documented from Dickens: the opening chapter of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) introduces Mr Godfrey Nickleby, who 'had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment' - wording verified on Wikisource. Wiktionary's citation trail runs on through Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), Xavier Herbert's Soldiers' Women (1961) and Time magazine (2008). Modern dictionaries agree on the sense: Farlex defines it as one's former lover, McGraw-Hill as a former sweetheart or lover. Some idiom websites date 'old flame' to the mid-17th century, but that conflates the older sweetheart sense of bare 'flame' with the compound, whose earliest verifiable use is Dickens. The same fire family includes 'carry a torch for someone', already catalogued here: the torch names the pining feeling, while an old flame names the person.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- ex-flame
- former flame
- rekindle an old flame
Usage Examples
- Running into an old flame at the reunion made the whole evening awkward.
- He insisted the woman joining us was just a colleague, but she was clearly an old flame.
- They rekindled an old flame thirty years after they first parted.