platonic love
Preserved but no longer current.
Spiritual love between persons of opposite sexes ; the friendship of man and woman, without anything sexual about it. The phrase is founded on a passage towards the end of the Symposium in which Plato was extolling not the non-sexual love of a man for a woman, but the loving interest that Socrates took in young men — which was pure, and therefore noteworthy in the Greece of the period.
Era: ca. 1898 (Victorian)
Sources & notes
Reproduced from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898 edition, public domain; archive.org, retrieved 2026-07-31; OCR text, minor errors possible). Reflects the scholarship and attitudes of its era.
Common questions
What does “platonic love” mean?
Spiritual love between persons of opposite sexes ; the friendship of man and woman, without anything sexual about it. The phrase is founded on a passage towards the end of the Symposium in which Plato was extolling not the non-sexual love of a man for a woman, but the loving interest that Socrates took in young men — which was pure, and therefore noteworthy in the Greece of the period.
Is “platonic love” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.