means A feeling or expression of love and emotional intimacy between people, or a story, mood, or sense of adventure and idealized beauty.

from From Old French 'romanz,' meaning a story written in the vernacular — the common Roman-derived tongue — rather than in scholarly Latin. The word traces to Vulgar Latin 'romanice,' 'in the Roman manner.' Since those popular tales overflowed with knights, quests, and love, 'romance' drifted from meaning 'a language' to 'a kind of story' to, eventually, the love itself. So the languages we call Romance and the feeling we call romantic share the same Roman root — a happy accident of linguistic geography.