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
-
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:
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
At Paul Revere Junior High, Russell won first place at a Shakespeare Festival for his sonnet recitation.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 28, 2025
It was a reference to a sonnet by Percy Bysse Shelley: Ozymandias, King of Kings.
From BBC ● Sep. 19, 2024
A day never went by without one of them breaking into song, reciting a sonnet, or dancing a jig.
From "Willodeen" by Katherine Applegate
The infatuated narrator toys with presenting his love-object with a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets and dreams of bringing him over to London.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 24, 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
Prof Smith said: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds is now one of Shakespeare's most famous sonnets, but it doesn't seem to have been very popular in his own time."
From BBC ● Mar. 4, 2025
It was also virtuosic, playing with forms from sonnets to the blues and a plethora of literary references.
From New York Times ● Jan. 19, 2024
I wrote more sonnets and odes to everything imaginable.
From "Bad Boy" by Walter Dean Myers
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
"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.
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
Cease from sonneting, my brothers; let us fashion songs from life.
From The Certain Hour by Cabell, James Branch
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
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
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.
