 The word Rome, and all of the words deriving from it, is one of my favorite examples of how the meaning of a word can just wildly bounce around at random. Rome, Roman, Romanesque, Romance, Romantic, all of these words originate from this city, and the name the Latin-speaking people who lived there gave it. Roma. No one's quite sure where this word comes from, although there are a few theories. The Romans themselves thought that it came from the name of the founder of their city, Romulus, but they also thought that he was raised by a wolf and descended directly into heaven at the end of his life, so I wouldn't put too much stock into that idea. Wherever it came from, they derived more words from the name of their city, like the word Romanus, which meant Roman, or having to do with Rome, and Romanicus, which meant something like in the style of Rome. Skipping forward a bit, the Romans eventually conquered what is today France, along with like everywhere else, but let's look at France for a sec. The Latin that came to be spoken there slowly diverged from the other dialects of Latin, eventually turning into Old French, but while it was still mutually intelligible with the other dialects of Latin, the phrase Romanicae scuribere was coined, which literally meant something like to write in the style of Rome, but basically came to mean to write in a language descended from Latin. From then on, words descended from the word Rome would refer to what we now call the Romance languages. For a few hundred years after people had stopped speaking classical Latin, they kept on writing in it anyway, out of habit and tradition. Eventually, though, during the Middle Ages, people finally started writing down various poems and epics, written in the Old French that people had actually started speaking. Because of all of this kind of literature written in the vernacular dialect, the phrase Romanicae scuribere eventually evolved into the phrase Romans, which basically just meant poem. This word survives today in the modern French word for novel. Eventually, the English picked up the phrase from the French, and basically the form it's in today, Romance. Unlike in France where it could refer to pretty much any poem written in French, in England it gained a more specific connotation, but not the kind we have today. It referred to the kind of epic tale of the exploits of a hero that was so popular in France at the time. By the 1600s, people were starting to associate the word with love, and with, like, how love should ideally be, because love tended to feature so prominently in these stories, but its primary usage still referred to a literary genre that didn't necessarily have anything to do with love. It would kind of be like if today we talked about how our boyfriend can be so action movie, or how that date we went on was really anime. The status of sometimes referring to love, but mostly just referring to really dramatic stuff, is the meaning that the word had in the 1800s, when the artistic movement known as Romanticism flourished. To these painters and writers and composers, something being romantic didn't necessarily mean it had to do with love, although it frequently did, but rather they used it to call back to the medieval poems and stories that they idealized and tried to emulate. To them, things that were romantic emphasized the importance and legitimacy of irrational emotions, spontaneity, and individualism. As time went on and the Romantic movement faded away, the word became more and more associated with things that we think of today when we hear the word Romantic, and by around the 1960s it came to refer exclusively to things having to do with love, and not just any kind of love either, but, well, you know, Romantic stuff, deeply emotional relationships that have some sort of sexual or physical aspect, unless they don't, but, ah, you know what I mean. Today, if anyone uses the term Romance or Romantic, they're explicitly saying this thing has something to do with Romantic love, but this is just the most recent usage of a word that's historically referred to all kinds of things, from cities to languages to literature to genres to artistic movements, and finally, to what today I can't find any alternative word for besides romance. Do you have a word or group of words that have interesting histories? Let me know in the comments, and I'll see you next time.