"old flame" meaning in All languages combined

See old flame on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Audio: En-au-old flame.ogg [Australia] Forms: old flames [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun}} old flame (plural old flames)
  1. (idiomatic) A previous boyfriend or girlfriend; a former romantic or sexual partner, especially one for whom one still has romantic feelings. Tags: idiomatic Related terms: carry a torch for
    Sense id: en-old_flame-en-noun-G4ZaW-P- Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries, Love, People

Inflected forms

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          "ref": "1838 March – 1839 October, Charles Dickens, chapter 1, in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1839, →OCLC:",
          "text": "There once lived, in a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire, one Mr Godfrey Nickleby: a worthy gentleman, who, taking it into his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment.",
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          "ref": "1922, F[rancis] Scott Fitzgerald, “(please specify the page)”, in Tales of the Jazz Age, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC:",
          "text": "\"Edith Bradin's coming,\" said some one to Gordon. \"Didn't she used to be an old flame of yours? Aren't you both from Harrisburg?\"",
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          "ref": "1961, Xavier Herbert, Soldiers' Women, Netley, SA: Fontana Books, published 1978, page 50:",
          "text": "Lolly Mulberry, a notorious playgirl, was an old flame of Tudy’s and an old enemy of Materkins’.",
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        "(idiomatic) A previous boyfriend or girlfriend; a former romantic or sexual partner, especially one for whom one still has romantic feelings."
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          "text": "There once lived, in a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire, one Mr Godfrey Nickleby: a worthy gentleman, who, taking it into his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment.",
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            [
              31,
              40
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          "text": "But Philip still yearns for an old flame: Schiffer, an Oscar-winning actress.",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-08-28 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-08-05 using wiktextract (872fc7b and 4deed51). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.