Meaning
Instant romantic attraction on a single glance - the thunderbolt that needs no introduction, no conversation, and no second look. The phrase describes the moment itself and, in retellings, the whole origin story of a couple. Romantic-narrative register, straight or ironic; the French coup de foudre, the lightning-stroke, is its cousin. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
The ancients treated it as god-sent: Greek and Roman thought made it theia mania, madness delivered by Eros's arrows, which entered through the eyes and pierced the heart - Plato's Symposium gives Aristophanes's split beings seeking their missing half, and Ovid has Echo lost to Narcissus at a glance. The troubadours built courtly love on the same eye-beam doctrine, love passing as light from the lady's eyes into the heart. The English phrase itself is Marlowe's, in Hero and Leander (1598): 'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?' - and Shakespeare quoted him the next year in As You Like It as the dead shepherd's saw of might. Romeo and Juliet ran on it, and a 2017 study cited in the record concludes it is really a strong initial attraction, with vivid retrospective accounts partly memory's confabulation - the lovers' story improving with the telling.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- fall in love at first sight
- it was love at first sight
- love at first glance
Usage Examples
- For the shopkeeper and the luthier, it was love at first sight over a cracked mandolin in the window.
- The director claimed love at first sight with the coastline; the camera agreed for forty years.
- Love at first sight, the widow maintained, is merely hindsight wearing its very best dress.