A lothario is a man who unscrupulously seduces women. The term was popularized through Nicholas Rowe's 1703 play The Fair Penitent, which featured a character with that name who, unsurprisingly, unscrupulously seduced women. Rowe didn't just make the name up, though; apparently it was previously used for a similar character in William Davenant's 1630 tragedy The Cruel Brother, and the word may have evolved from stock character status into what it is today. The name comes from Old English Hlothari, which literally meant "famous warrior": hloth comes from Old High German lut, meaning "noisy" (or, in this case, "famous", from Proto-Indo-European klutos, also "famous") and the other element is heri, the Old English word for "army" (from PIE korio, meaning "war").
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic, a senior studying government and linguistics at Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy trivia, politics, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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