Paramoured

Part of speech: verb, adjective

Definitions

1. Describing a person who has taken a secret lover, usually someone involved in an illicit or hidden romantic relationship
2. Referring to someone who is involved with a lover outside of marriage or an openly acknowledged relationship
3. Characterizing a person who keeps a clandestine romantic partner, often while still bound to another relationship

Etymology: The past tense "paramoured" is simply the verb "paramour" in its past form, so the story belongs to the verb's root. That root is a French phrase, "par amour," meaning "by or through love," built from "par" ("by, through") and "amour" ("love"), which descends from Latin "amor." English first took the phrase as an adverb, meaning something like "passionately" or "in a courteous or friendly manner." The adverb then gave rise to a noun, "paramour," which in Middle English could mean a wife, a concubine, a husband, a sweetheart, romantic love, or even the Virgin Mary and Christ. Its narrower sense of an illicit lover came later, and the noun may owe its shape partly to a misreading of the phrase "to love paramours," meaning "to love passionately," as if it meant "to love a beloved person." The verb is more tangled. A Middle English "paramouren," meaning "to love someone," survives in only one possibly fifteenth-century source, then vanishes until the seventeenth century, when writers such as Shakespeare used a related form. Most later uses of the verb probably come straight from the noun.