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Valentine’s Day word search
Sixteen words for February 14: valentines and love letters, roses and a bouquet, chocolates and truffles, Cupid and his arrow, candlelight, a sonnet and a secret admirer.
Words read across, down and diagonally, left to right, in big capitals on a 12 by 12 grid. The leftover letters spell a saying about what keeps the world turning.
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Solving tips
Look for the rare letters first: a Z, Q, J, X or K is easy to spot in big print. Then circle the long words, which cross more of the grid. Every letter belongs to a word or to the hidden saying, so the uncircled letters left at the end are the saying, in order.
In this grid, 6 words read across, 4 words down and 6 words diagonally, and none read backward. The longest is Candlelight and the shortest is Roses, which hides best: look for it last.
About the words
Valentine’s Day falls on February 14, the feast day of St. Valentine, an early Christian martyr about whom little is known for certain. The link with romance appears in the 1300s in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote of birds choosing their mates on St. Valentine’s Day.
- Admirer
- A valentine signed only “from a secret admirer” is an old custom. Working out who sent it is part of the fun.
- Arrow
- In Roman myth, Cupid carried two kinds of arrows: gold-tipped ones that caused love and lead-tipped ones that drove it away.
- Be mine
- Short mottoes like this one are printed on candy hearts and cards. It is a clipped form of the best-known line on any valentine: “Be my Valentine.”
- Bouquet
- A bouquet is a bunch of cut flowers arranged to be carried or given. The word is French and first meant a little wood or clump of trees.
- Candlelight
- A candle flame gives a warm, yellowish light, far dimmer than an electric bulb, which is why it softens a room and suits a quiet dinner for two.
- Chocolates
- Heart-shaped boxes of chocolates date from the 1860s in England. The decorated boxes were meant to be kept afterward for letters and keepsakes.
- Cupid
- Cupid is the Roman god of love, the son of Venus, shown as a winged boy with a bow. His Greek counterpart is Eros.
- Darling
- Darling comes from the Old English deorling, a little dear one. It is one of the oldest terms of affection still in use in English.
- February
- February is named for Februa, a Roman festival of purification held in the middle of the month. It is the only month with fewer than 30 days.
- Love letter
- Before telephones, courtship was often carried on by mail. Cheaper postage in the 1840s, in both Britain and the United States, helped make sending valentines a popular custom.
- Romance
- The word first meant a story told in a Romance language such as Old French, usually a tale of knights and their adventures. Its sense of a love affair came later.
- Roses
- The red rose was linked with Venus, the Roman goddess of love. In the Victorian “language of flowers” a red rose meant love, which made it the flower of the day.
- Sonnet
- A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines. The form came from Italy, and Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, published in 1609, include some of the best-known love poems in English.
- Sweetheart
- The word has meant someone dearly loved since the Middle Ages. Small candy hearts stamped with short messages have been sold in the United States since the early 1900s.
- Truffles
- A chocolate truffle is a ball of ganache, which is chocolate melted with cream, rolled in cocoa. It is named for its likeness to the truffle, a prized fungus dug from the ground.
- Valentine
- A valentine is both the card and the person it is sent to. The oldest known valentine in English is a letter of 1477 from Margery Brews to John Paston, whom she calls her “right well-beloved Valentine.”
The hidden saying (no peeking until you have found every word): The saying means that love is what keeps life moving. It is old in English, and a version of it appears in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865), where the Duchess declares that it is love “that makes the world go round.”
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