The name that stuck to personal ads for most of the twentieth century.
Personal ads, or the clubs and columns that ran them.
| Type | Historical language |
|---|---|
| Category | Period vocabulary |
| Phrase dated | 1949, Merriam-Webster |
| Most common | 1920s to the 2000s |
Lonely hearts clubs charged a fee and mailed members catalogs of ads, and by 1961 there were at least 500 of them. Merriam-Webster dates lonely hearts as a set phrase to 1949. In Britain the lonely hearts column became the standard name for newspaper personals, and it survived into the 2000s.
Sources: Wikipedia, Personal advertisement.
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How this fits into 170 years of personal ad shorthand: From Object Matrimony to LTR: How Personal Ads Learned to Talk in Code.
All dictionary entries · The Personals Archive · How to write a personal ad
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