Love is in the Air....

With Valentine's Day on its way I thought it would be a nice idea to look at some idioms using the word 'heart'.

One expression is 'to wear your heart on your sleeve', which means to openly show your feelings and opinions and not to hide the way you really feel about something.

John always has his heart on his sleeve so that everyone knows how he feels.

A second expression is 'to learn something (off) by heart' which is when you learn something in a way that you can say it from memory.

I can still recite off by heart the extracts of Romeo and Juliet that I learnt at school.

Tom has seen that film so many times he knows all the lines off by heart!

Another expression is 'to have a heart of stone' which is used to describe a person who is unkind and cruel. Scrooge from Dickens' A Christmas Carol is a famous example of someone with a heart of stone. This is of course the opposite to having 'a heart of gold'.

The fourth and final expression for today is 'to set your heart on something'. When you do this it means that you really, really want to get something or achieve something.

Sarah has really set her heart on having a puppy.

Of course, there are many, many more idioms and expressions using the word heart in English. Too many for this entry. Perhaps you would like to discover some more by yourself on the Online Cambridge Dictionary. If you find one you particularly like, why not post it in the comments box!