"belle dame sans merci" meaning in English

See belle dame sans merci in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: belles dames sans merci [plural]
Etymology: French [Term?] (literally “beautiful woman without mercy”). La Belle Dame sans Merci is the title of a ballad produced by the English poet John Keats in 1819; this was derived from the title of a 15th-century poem by Alain Chartier, La Belle Dame sans Mercy. Etymology templates: {{bor|en|fr|lit=beautiful woman without mercy}} French [Term?] (literally “beautiful woman without mercy”) Head templates: {{en-noun|belles dames sans merci|nolinkhead=1}} belle dame sans merci (plural belles dames sans merci)
  1. (literature) A beautiful woman who seduces a man and then consigns him to an unpleasant fate. Categories (topical): Literature, Stock characters Related terms: ice queen

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for belle dame sans merci meaning in English (2.3kB)

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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). 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.