Word.ws English Dictionary

no love lost

no love lost noun: mutual dislike or animosity.

Noun

no love lost (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic) Mutual dislike or animosity.
    • There was no love lost between the two opponents.
    • I thought I saw him leer in an ugly way at me while the decanters were going round, but as there was no love lost between us, that might easily be.1860 December – 1861 August, Charles Dickens, chapter XXXVIII, in Great Expectations […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Chapman and Hall, […], published October 1861, →OCLC

Examples of no love lost in a sentence

  • By Crums, they might get the salts and oxalic acid mixed up if they came to treat me, for there’s no love lost between us.1895, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, The Stark Munro Letters: […], London: Longmans, Green, and Co., →OCLC:
  • “My boys are practically all bushmen, while these chaps are salt-water men, and there’s no love lost between them.1911 March, Jack London, Adventure, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC:
  • He hadn't seen his brother for years, and I guess there was no love lost.1922, Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Breaking Point:
  • No love lost between Greece and England.1957, Ian Fleming, chapter 22, in From Russia With Love:

Questions about no love lost

What does no love lost mean?
No love lost means mutual dislike or animosity.
How do you use no love lost in a sentence?
By Crums, they might get the salts and oxalic acid mixed up if they came to treat me, for there’s no love lost between us.
What part of speech is no love lost?
No love lost is a noun.

Words near no love lost in the dictionary

  1. no liability
  2. no limit
  3. no lone zone
  4. no longer
  5. no longer with us
  6. no love lost
  7. no man
  8. no man is an island
  9. No Man's Heath
  10. No Man's Heath and District
  11. no man's land

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: no love lost (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-no love lost.ogg.

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