sonnet
Americannoun
verb (used without object)
verb (used with object)
noun
verb
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(intr) to compose sonnets
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(tr) to celebrate in a sonnet
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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sonnetsimple
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sonnetssimple
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have sonnetedperfect
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has sonnetedperfect
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am sonnetingprogressive
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are sonnetingprogressive
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is sonnetingprogressive
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have been sonnetingperfect progressive
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has been sonnetingperfect progressive
Past
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sonnetedsimple
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had sonnetedperfect
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was sonnetingprogressive
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were sonnetingprogressive
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had been sonnetingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of sonnet
1550–60; < Italian sonnetto < Old Provençal sonet, equivalent to son poem (< Latin sonus sound 1 ) + -et -et
Explanation
A sonnet is a poem, often a love poem, of 14 rhyming lines. Is that a love letter from your secret admirer or a formal sonnet? The word sonnet comes from the Italian sonetto, meaning “little song.” The origin makes sense, since the first sonnets were developed by the Italian poet Petrarch. But the sonnet form we are most familiar with today is Shakespearean. Many of the most often quoted lines in poetry come from Shakespeare’s sonnets, such as this ending couplet from Sonnet 18, “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
Vocabulary lists containing sonnet
Poetry: Genres
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Reading: Literature - Poetry - Middle School
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The AP English Exam: Rhetorical and Literary Terms 4
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The confines of a structure make your brain work in a different way: How do I get this idea across in a sonnet or a villanelle?
From Los Angeles Times ● May 11, 2026
When you can write a sonnet but can’t spell “strawberry,” you haven’t achieved intelligence.
From MarketWatch ● Nov. 3, 2025
Underneath her outfit, “in a little bag next to her skin,” Vaill says, “she wore his little poem,” a love sonnet he’d written her during their courtship.
From Slate ● Oct. 21, 2025
The sonnet sits in the miscellany alongside "politically charged" works from the 1640s - the decade of the English Civil War, fought between Royalists and Parliamentarians.
From BBC ● Mar. 4, 2025
The sonnet form allowed me to make my poems look and feel like real poetry without being as distant as some of the other British poetry I had read.
From "Bad Boy" by Walter Dean Myers
While kids in regular public schools put in their numbing hours, students in spreading networks of classical charters get meaty reading assignments—myths, fairy tales, great books—while also memorizing sonnets and elements of America’s founding documents.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 16, 2026
Stratford-upon-Avon born playwright Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece to Wriothesley, who some think was the "fair youth" to whom many of Shakespeare's sonnets are addressed.
From BBC ● Sep. 8, 2025
No one is writing social media sonnets about eating a yellow squash over the kitchen sink while wearing their ex’s oversized T-shirt, still scented with a perfume they stopped wearing last fall.
From Salon ● Aug. 12, 2025
An occasional poet, he wooed her with sonnets, and they married in 1966.
From New York Times ● Jun. 22, 2023
Alas, the only books Penelope had close at hand were the cannibal book, her own book of melancholy German poetry in translation, Alexander’s book of Shakespeare sonnets, and Mr. Gibbon’s tome about the Roman Empire.
From "The Interrupted Tale" by Maryrose Wood
"My Luve's Like a Red, Red Rose" is altogether delightful, containing as it does a suggestion of the old formalities and courtly graces of the music of Lawes, whose songs Milton sonneted.
He spoke 'and the numbers came'; he sonneted as easily as a living poet, in his Eton days, improvised Latin elegiacs and Greek hexameters.
From Ballads in Blue China by Lang, Andrew
But Chloe had intimated that her graceful fingers were engaged with the inkpot and her head with schemes for further sonneting.
From Judith of the Plains by Manning, Marie
Cease from sonneting, my brothers; let us fashion songs from life.
From The Certain Hour by Cabell, James Branch
Your eyes do make no coaches; in your tears There is no certain princess that appears: You'll not be perjur'd; 'tis a hateful thing: Tush! none but minstrels like of sonneting.
From Love's Labour's Lost by Shakespeare, William
But there was other work than sonneting afoot that night, and shortly I set about it.
From Gallantry Dizain des Fetes Galantes by Cabell, James Branch
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
