Meaning
Struck suddenly and helplessly by love or by enthusiasm - and the word freely admits that the blow was landed before any defence was possible. One is smitten with a person, a place, an idea, or, in the verb's older and darker sense, by the flu or by God. Warm and slightly comic - it flatters the struck party's helplessness; keep the biblical echo for afflictions and dragons. Regional use: General English; from the biblical verb.
Origin
The past participle of smite, to strike, from Old English and a Proto-Germanic root meaning to hurl or fling - and the language has always liked the passive: to be smitten is to have been hit. The King James inheritance gave the plague sense - God smote the land of Egypt - and the Farlex record keeps the ladder: to smite with a blow, chiefly fantasy literature now; to afflict with a condition, biblical; and, almost exclusively in the passive, to enamour - Mary has always been smitten with you, John. The love sense is documented from the early twentieth century, a 1912 procession already containing a smitten woman, and the current run - smitten man, hopelessly smitten enthusiasts for a sailing dinghy, can see why Mari's so smitten - shows the blow still landing daily, sometimes on entire offices confronted with a precocious child or a kitten.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- hopelessly smitten
- smitten kitten
- smitten with
Usage Examples
- The inspector was smitten with the cottage and made an offer from the doorstep, survey pending.
- One smitten kitten of a chairman reorganised the gala around the soprano's train times.
- Colleagues could see he was smitten from the start; the flute recitals were only the second clue.