love bite
1
7.4
- noun
- /lʌv baɪt/
- NSFW
:
marca de amor
- Do you have a love bite on your neck?
Examples
-
Then she grabbed his jaw with her teeth and gave him the same kind of growling, gentle love-bite back.
Fiction book (1990) -
He noticed a love bite on her shoulder after their romantic evening together.
-
Yeah, it's a love bite.
-
It's just a little love bite.
-
Love bites have never sounded so sexy.
Blog text (11) -
How's that for a love bite to soothe your aching head?
-
She showed off the love bite on her neck proudly, evidence of a passionate night.
-
The love bite on his arm was a playful reminder of their affectionate kiss.
Synonyms
16
8.0
A red mark on the skin made by kissing or sucking to show affection
How Visible
266
1.6
- NSFW
1
7.4
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun compound plainly links a physical mark ('bite') to a romantic context ('love'), so a learner who knows both words can infer it denotes some kind of mark made in a lovers' context. However, the specific conventional meaning — a hickey caused by sucking rather than a literal bite — is somewhat idiomatic and culturally specific, so the exact sense is not fully predictable from the constituents.
Etymology
Love bite comes from a simple picture: when people kiss and suck or lightly bite the skin, they leave a small red mark that can look like a bite. Because the mark comes from romantic kissing, people put the words love and bite together to name it, so love bite now means 'a mark left on the skin after kissing'.