Nympholept

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Someone who is overcome by a passionate, frenzied desire for something beyond reach, especially a figure of ideal beauty
2. A person driven into ecstatic longing by an unattainable ideal, traditionally imagined as one seized by the nymphs
3. One who is seized by a rapturous, obsessive yearning for an elusive or unattainable object of beauty

Etymology: Nympholepsy was a state of rapture or frenzy that the ancient Greeks attributed to being seized by nymphs. The word combines "númphē", meaning "nymph" or "bride", with "lambánō", meaning "I take" or "I seize". Someone who was "numphólēptos" was thought to have been caught by a supernatural force, and the frenzy often showed itself as a passionate, obsessive longing, most often for something out of reach. The word and its ancient sense have a shared root with the ordinary English "nymph", which came into the language from Latin "nympha", itself borrowed from Greek. The Greek noun "númphē" could mean a young bride as well as a minor goddess of woods, springs or meadows, so the idea of being seized by a nymph carried both the sense of divine possession and of an unsettling erotic pull.