How a 'coup de foudre' can lead to 'vernalagnia' and even some 'firkytoodling': Countdown's SUSIE DENT reveals the lost language of love (and it could even spice up your Valentine's Day card)

The word ‘love’ does a lot of heavy lifting. For an emotion that has inspired centuries of art, poetry and music, and that comes in so many different forms, you’d think we’d have hundreds of words for it.

The love we feel for a partner is not the same as the one we feel for our parents, and the affection we hold towards friends is very different from that we reserve for our children. Yet we use ‘love’ for all of them – there is simply no synonym that expresses any of them adequately.

It wasn’t always this way. Distinctions between different kinds of love were once carefully drawn in Old English. ‘Bearn-lufu’ was a mother’s love for her child, ‘sib-lufu’ was ‘kin-love’ for one’s relatives, and freond-lufu was ‘friend-love’.

The ancient Greeks took it even further: their lexicon of love included ‘eros’ (sexual love), ‘xenia’ (the love you feel for your guests), and ‘philautia’ (the love of oneself).

But the fact that all of those now come down to a single word that will adorn almost every greetings card this Valentine’s Day doesn’t mean that the annals of affection are sketchy. In fact, an hour’s happy riffling through a historical dictionary can offer up a host of words with which to express devotion – or the lack of it. If we throw some words from other languages into the mix, the landscape is even richer.

Countdown's Suzie Dent explores the language of love in her new book, Words From The Heart: An Emotional Dictionary

The Victorians used the word 'firkytoodling' to describe 'provocative caresses'

So, if you’re a card-maker, the French offer a typically beautiful metaphor for love at first sight in ‘coup de foudre’, a ‘lightning strike’. It’s what many of us hope for in life, even if some of us have to settle for ‘sphallolalia’: flirtation that goes absolutely nowhere (a word that goes rather nicely with ‘fribbler’, one who professes true love but somehow never commits).

No matter how you got there, the word ‘limerence’ is what you need for the intense infatuation you feel in the early stages of love. Occasionally this is set off by ‘vernalagnia’, the romantic feelings (or pure lust) inspired by springtime when nature is suddenly ‘erumpent’ (bursting forth).

Both emotions might induce some ‘lovelight’, a pretty term from the 19th century for the radiance in someone’s eyes when they look at a person they love.

Such a look doesn’t, of course, always yield instant results. The Yaghan people of South America have given us one of the most famous ‘untranslatables’ in recent years in ‘mamihlapinatapai’ (pronounced ma-mi-la-pee-na-ta-pay), which means looking at another person in the hope they will make the first move. It is even listed in the Guinness Book Of Records as the ‘most succinct word’ in any language.

‘Basorexia’ sounds far less pleasant, but it is in fact the sudden and overwhelming desire to kiss someone. Should your kisses multiply and you become ‘elumbated’ (or ‘weakened in the loins’), you could do a lot worse than borrowing from the Victorians, for whom ‘firkytoodling’ was once defined as ‘those provocative caresses which constitute the normal preliminaries to sexual congress’.

If you’re needing to express sex itself, you might enjoy such frisky euphemisms as ‘playing at hot cockles’ (1500s), doing the ‘service of Venus’ (1600s), and enjoying some ‘fandango de pokum’ (1800s).

Then there is the question as to what to call the focus of all this attention. There are, of course, many endearments to draw on for a loved one. Most of us stick with such tried and tested stalwarts as ‘darling’, ‘sweetheart’, ‘babe’, ‘honey’, etc., but there is much more variety to be had when it comes to linguistic loving up.

Suzie Dent says the word ‘love’ does a lot of heavy lifting, but there are plenty of fascinating alternatives in languages around the world

Taste often seems a good place to start. Sweet nothings of the past include ‘honeybuns’, ‘cinnamon’, ‘crumpets’, ‘lamb-chops’, ‘munchkins’, and even ‘tart’ (which went, as we know, mostly downhill). Others over the centuries – such as ‘cabbage’, ‘prawn’ and ‘bagpudding’ – might be best left in the dust.

Animals have also acted as synonyms of affection: ‘duckling’, ‘dove’, ‘ladybird’ and ‘chuck’ have been sealed with a kiss for centuries. ‘Pigsney’ is a much odder example. You might think this refers to a pig’s knee, which is bad enough, but it is actually a version of ‘pig’s eye’. Far better surely to go to Irish instead, which offers one of the most beautiful pet names in the word ‘macushla’, which translates literally as ‘my pulse’.

Sadly, and as we have all discovered at some point, we must sometimes accept that love is over, or that we have simply ‘misloved’ by choosing the wrong person. While we may long for ‘redamancy’, 17th-century speak for ‘being adored in return’, many of us experience instead ‘tabanca’, a word from Caribbean English that describes the pain of a relationship ending, and the longing for the person now lost. Mind you, if this tempts you to go back and try again in the belief that all previous problems will have magically disappeared, think again: the Italians know this as ‘cavoli riscaldati’, or ‘reheated cabbage’ – never a good idea.

Of course, the best kind of love is often selfless. Pure, altruistic affection shines through such forgotten words as ‘confelicity’, which expresses joy in the happiness of others. Seventeenth-century English also offers ‘antipelargy’, which may not be exactly mellifluous but which expresses one of the most profound emotions of all: the love between child and parent.

It springs from the Greek ‘pelargos’ (‘stork’) referring to the bird’s reputation in antiquity as one of the most affectionate and loyal of all creatures that carries its elderly parents on its wings in flight.

So much of the joy of loving comes, of course, from family, but if you’ve ever been guilty of gleefully pinching the cheeks of a child in response, you should know about ‘gigil’, a term from the Filipino language of Tagalog that means ‘the irresistible desire to squeeze something cute’, however painful (let alone embarrassing) for the squeezee.

Mutual cuddling is an altogether gentler affair, and the dictionary offers hundreds of synonyms for the act of nestling snugly. Local dialect, in particular, loves a snuggle: here you will come across ‘croozling’, ‘croodling’, ‘cummudging’, ‘neezling’, ‘nuddling’, ‘nuzzling’, ‘snoozling’ and ‘snuggening’. One of the best is surely ‘snoodging’, from Yorkshire, which is defined as to ‘nestle or lie closely together’.

Whoever is the object of your affection in the days ahead, it is good to know that ‘love’ is one of the oldest words we have. We may rely on it for myriad situations and relationships, but that has never weakened its power. Instead, it remains one of the most meaningful descriptions of emotion. So, if Valentine’s Day is your thing, I wish you redamancy aplenty and, perhaps, some happy firkytoodling too. If it isn’t, a bit of self-love, that Greek philautia, never goes amiss. I hear it goes quite well with chocolate.

Words From The Heart: An Emotional Dictionary by Susie Dent is published by John Murray Press at £12.99 in paperback, ebook and audio.