Why Do We Call People Honey? The History of Honey and Sweetheart as Terms of Love

Why do we call people honey? The short answer is that for most of human history, honey was the sweetest thing a person could taste, and English speakers have used "sweet" as a stand-in for "dear" and "lovable" for well over a thousand years. Calling someone honey is a way of saying, "You're the best, most delightful thing in my day." The word itself goes back to Old English, and people were already using it as a pet name in the 1300s.

That's the quick version. The longer version is more fun. It takes us through Chaucer's bawdy-but-sweet lovers, one of Shakespeare's most famous husbands, a pair of modern psychology studies about sugar and romance, and a few etiquette rules worth knowing before you call your server, your coworker or your new crush "hon." Let's walk through it.

Why do we call people honey: the short answer

There are really three reasons the word stuck, and they work together.

1. Honey was the original treat. Before cane sugar became cheap and common, honey was the main way most people sweetened anything. It was precious, it was pleasant, and everyone knew exactly what it tasted like.
2. English already linked sweetness to love. Words like "sweet," "sweetheart" and "sweeting" were in use for people we cherish long before most modern pet names existed. Honey slotted right into that family.
3. It's short, soft and easy to say. Two syllables, a gentle "h" and a warm "-ey" ending, the same ending that shows up in "sweetie," "bunny" and "hubby." It sounds affectionate even before you think about what it means.

Put those together and you get one of the most durable terms of endearment in English. It has outlasted dozens of pet names that were popular for a generation and then vanished. If you're curious how honey fits into the bigger picture of affectionate words, our guide to terms of endearment covers the whole family.

Honey before sugar: why sweetness meant so much

It's hard to picture now, when sugar is in nearly every packaged food, but sweetness used to be rare. For ordinary people in medieval Europe, honey and fruit were the main sweet things they'd ever taste. That made honey a natural symbol for anything delightful, comforting or good.

You can see this in the oldest texts English speakers knew by heart. The King James Bible, long in the public domain, describes the Promised Land as a land flowing with milk and honey. And in the Song of Solomon, a book of love poetry, the lover tells his bride that her lips "drop as the honeycomb" and that "honey and milk are under thy tongue." You can read the verse on Bible Gateway's King James text of Song of Solomon 4:11.

That's the key point. For centuries, readers grew up with honey as a picture of both abundance and romantic love. When someone called their beloved "honey," the word carried all of that: something rare, golden, nourishing and sweet.

A word about "sweet" itself

"Sweet" has done double duty in English for a very long time. It describes taste, but it also describes a kind voice, a pleasant smell, a gentle person or a good outcome. When we say a toddler is sweet, nobody thinks we've tasted them. The metaphor is so built into the language that we barely notice it. Honey simply took that metaphor and made it into a name.

From hunig to hony: the word's long history

"Honey" is one of the oldest words in English. Dictionary.com's entry for honey dates the word to before the year 900. It comes from Middle English hony and Old English hunig, and it has close cousins in other Germanic languages: Dutch and German honig and Old Norse hunang.

The same entry records the senses we care about here. As a noun, honey can mean a person you love, a sweetheart or darling. It's also a term of address, a name you call someone, for a child or a romantic partner. There's even a verb: to "honey" someone, or to "honey up" to them, means to talk to them flatteringly or sweetly.

Here's the timeline in one place. Dates are the dictionary dates cited in this article, given as the ranges the dictionaries use.

When	Word or form	What happened
Before 900	hunig (Old English)	The word for the food made by bees is already in use.
Before 900	dēorling (Old English)	The ancestor of "darling," meaning "little dear one," is in use too.
1250 to 1300	swete herte (Middle English)	"Sweetheart" is first recorded as two words.
1387 to 1400	hony, hony-comb	Chaucer's characters use honey words as pet names in The Canterbury Tales.
Shakespeare's era	"Honey"	Shakespeare's Othello greets his new wife with it.
1695 to 1705	"Sweetie"	The "-ie" form of "sweet" is first recorded.

Notice how the pattern repeats. Every few centuries, English speakers take the old sweet words and build new, cuter versions from them. "Sweet" becomes "sweetheart," then "sweetie." "Honey" becomes "honeybunch," "honey bun" and the clipped "hon." The core idea never changes. Only the packaging does.

Honey in early English literature: Chaucer and Shakespeare

Dictionary dates tell you when a word was written down. Literature shows you how people actually used it. And here, honey shows up in two places that are worth a closer look.

Chaucer's honeycomb

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales chiefly between 1387 and 1400, according to the catalog summary at Project Gutenberg's edition of The Canterbury Tales. In "The Miller's Tale," a comic story about a carpenter, his young wife Alisoun and two men who fancy her, the honey words come thick and fast. The parish clerk Absolon stands under Alisoun's window at night and calls up to her. In the Middle English text hosted by the University of Washington's edition of The Miller's Tale, he asks, "What do ye, hony-comb, sweete Alisoun," and goes on to call her his "faire bryd" (fair bird) and his "sweete cynamome" (sweet cinnamon).

So in one breath, a 14th-century suitor uses a honey name, a bird name and a spice name. That's not so different from a modern texter cycling through "honey," "lovebird" and "sugar." Later in the same tale, the narrator calls Alisoun her husband's "hony deere," his honey dear. The phrase is used plainly, without explanation, which tells us readers already knew it as an affectionate name.

The tale itself is a rowdy comedy, so we won't retell the plot here. What matters for word history is that "honey" as a pet name was ordinary enough in Chaucer's day to be dropped into a story for laughs.

Shakespeare's honey

Now jump ahead to Shakespeare. In Shakespeare's Othello, the hero arrives in Cyprus and is reunited with his new wife, Desdemona. He turns to her and says, "Honey, you shall be well desired in Cyprus." You can read the line in context in the Folger Shakespeare Library's text of Othello, Act 2, Scene 1.

That moment is interesting because Othello is a general, a serious and formal man. Yet the word he reaches for in a happy, public moment with his wife is "honey." It was clearly a natural, warm thing for a husband to say, not a silly or childish one.

What these examples tell us

• Honey has always been for close relationships. Both Chaucer's and Shakespeare's uses are between lovers or spouses.
• It mixed freely with other sweet words. Chaucer pairs it with "sweet" and "cinnamon," a sign that food and spice names were already a pet-name category.
• It wasn't considered slang. Writers put it into the mouths of clerks and generals alike.

If you love seeing how older couples spoke to each other, our list of vintage terms of endearment collects many more names from earlier centuries.

Sweetheart: the other sweet word

Honey's closest relative is "sweetheart," and its history is just as old. Dictionary.com's entry for sweetheart says the word was first recorded between 1250 and 1300, from Middle English swete herte, which is simply "sweet" plus "heart."

That's worth pausing on. A "sweet heart" was first a description: a kind, loving heart, or the heart of someone dear to you. Over time the two words fused into one, and the meaning shifted from "a sweet heart" to "the person I love." Today the dictionary lists several senses:

• one of two people in a romantic relationship, as seen by the other
• an affectionate form of address, as in "Thanks, sweetheart"
• a person who is deeply loved
• informally, a kind, generous person ("She's a real sweetheart")
• even something you're fond of and that's dependable, like a reliable old car

Honey and sweetheart now behave almost the same way. Both can be names for a partner, both can be used for children, and both can slide into casual, friendly use with near-strangers. That last use is where etiquette comes in, and we'll get there shortly.

Honey versus sweetheart: is there a difference?

In practice, many people use them interchangeably. But they do carry slightly different flavors:

• Honey feels casual, everyday and warm. It's what you say when you call out "Honey, have you seen my keys?"
• Sweetheart feels a touch more tender or old-fashioned. It's at home in a love song, a card or a quiet moment.
• Sweetheart also works well as a noun about someone ("my high school sweetheart"), where "honey" sounds odd ("my high school honey" is playful, not standard).

The sweet family of pet names compared

Honey belongs to a big family of food and sweetness names. Here's how the main members compare, using the origin dates given in dictionary entries where we have them.

Name	Built from	First recorded	Feel	Best for
Honey	Old English hunig	Word before 900; pet-name use in Middle English	Warm, everyday	Partners, kids, close family
Sweetheart	swete + herte	1250 to 1300	Tender, classic	Partners, cards, love notes
Darling	Old English dēorling, "little dear"	Before 900	Elegant, a bit dramatic	Partners, playful formality
Sweetie	"sweet" + "-ie"	1695 to 1705	Soft, gentle	Partners, children
Sugar	From Arabic sukkar via French	Word 1250 to 1300; no date given for the pet-name sense	Flirty, a little retro	Partners, with a wink

A few notes on the table. Dictionary.com's entry for darling explains that it comes from Old English dēorling, built from "dear" plus the little-one suffix "-ling," the same suffix you see in "duckling." The entry for sweetie dates it to 1695 to 1705 and notes that in Britain "sweeties" can also mean candy.

For sugar, the dictionary lists the affectionate sense but doesn't give a separate date for it, so we haven't guessed one. What we can say is that sugar became a common pet name long after honey, which makes sense: sugar itself only became a common household food relatively recently in English history.

Want more food-inspired names in this style? Our list of food nicknames for your boyfriend has plenty of sweet options, from "cupcake" to "sweet pea."

Is there science behind sweet names?

Here's where things get interesting. Psychologists have asked whether the link between sweetness and kindness is just a figure of speech, or whether our bodies take it a little literally. The research is intriguing, but it's also mixed, so let's be careful with it.

The "sweet personality" study

In 2012, a team led by Brian Meier published five studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The summary on Gettysburg College's research repository explains their starting point: kind, helpful people are often called "sweet," so maybe the metaphor reveals something real. In their studies, people guessed that strangers who liked sweet foods were more agreeable. People who preferred sweet foods also reported more helpful, cooperative personalities. And briefly eating something sweet, compared with something not sweet or nothing at all, nudged up people's self-reported agreeableness and helping.

Here's the important caveat. These were a handful of lab studies with small groups of college students, and findings like these need to be repeated by other researchers, in other places, before anyone can call them settled. So the fair reading is: the idea is fascinating and the original results were real findings, but it's still an open question. Treat it as "maybe," not "proven."

The "sweet love" study

A second line of research looked at romance directly. In 2015, Dongning Ren and colleagues published "Sweet love: The effects of sweet taste experience on initial romantic perceptions" in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. As the abstract on James Cook University's research archive notes, the researchers started from the observation that people commonly describe partners with words like "sweetie" and "honey."

They found that people who had just tasted something sweet rated a hypothetical new relationship more favorably than people who had tasted something not sweet. In another study, sweet taste was linked to more interest in starting a relationship with a potential partner. But, and this is the interesting twist, tasting something sweet did not change how people felt about a relationship they were already in.

So what does this mean for "honey"?

Nobody calls a partner honey because of a lab result. The pet name is far older than psychology. What the research suggests is that the sweetness metaphor isn't random. Our language may be picking up on a real, if small and fragile, link between pleasant tastes and warm feelings. If you'd like more on why couples use pet names at all, our article on the psychology of pet names looks at the research on that bigger question.

Who says honey, and where

"Honey" is used all over the English-speaking world, but the way people use it varies a lot from place to place and person to person. Here are the main patterns you'll hear, described in general terms.

Between partners

This is the classic use and the one most people think of first. It works in every generation. Plenty of long-married couples call each other honey dozens of times a day without thinking about it. For many, it's the default pet name, the one that comes out when nothing more specific does.

Parents and children

Parents call kids honey all the time, and grandparents even more. In this use, it's purely affectionate and protective, with no romantic meaning at all. Dictionaries list this use alongside the romantic one.

Friendly strangers

In some places, especially in parts of the American South and in classic diners and small-town shops, you'll hear "honey" or "hon" used with customers and strangers. A server might say, "What can I get you, hon?" In those settings it's meant as plain friendliness, like "friend" or "dear."

Britain has its own versions of this habit, though the word is often different: "love," "duck," "pet" or "darlin'," depending on the region. Our guide to British terms of endearment breaks those down by area. Closer to home, our Southern nicknames list shows how warmly sweet words are used in the American South.

In writing: cards, notes and texts

Honey works a little differently on paper than out loud. Spoken, it's quick and casual. Written at the top of a card or a note, "Honey," feels deliberate and tender, almost like "Dearest." Many people who never think twice about saying honey will pause before writing it, because written pet names feel more like a statement.

In texts, it often shrinks. "Hon" and "hun" both show up as quick sign-offs, and some people use them with friends as well as partners. If you're writing a love note and want honey to feel special rather than routine, try pairing it with something specific: "Honey, thank you for last night's dinner" lands warmer than "Hey honey." Our guide to texting nicknames has more ideas for names that look good on a screen.

Popular culture

Songwriters have leaned on honey for generations because it rhymes easily and sounds sweet when sung. "Honey" and "sugar" are both staples of pop, country and soul lyrics. That steady stream of songs keeps the word feeling current even though it's centuries old.

Honey etiquette: when it lands and when it doesn't

Here's the part people really want to know. Honey is a lovely word, but context matters. Dictionary.com includes a usage note worth taking seriously: calling a stranger, an acquaintance or someone who works under you "honey" can come across as offensive, especially when a man uses it toward a woman. The same note appears on its entry for "sugar."

Why? Because a pet name assumes closeness. When there isn't any, the word can feel like it's putting someone in a smaller, younger or less serious role. Here's a simple guide.

Situation	Is "honey" a good idea?	Why
Your partner, who likes it	Yes	That's what it's for.
Your own child or grandchild	Yes	A long-standing, gentle use.
A close friend who uses it back	Usually	Mutual use signals it's welcome.
A coworker or employee	No	It can sound condescending at work.
A stranger or customer	Usually no	Some regions accept it, but many people don't.
Someone you've just started dating	Wait a bit	Let closeness come first.

When your partner doesn't love it

Some people simply don't like being called honey. Maybe it reminds them of a parent, or it feels generic, or it was a word an ex used. That's not a rejection of you. It just means the word doesn't fit. Our article on what to do when your partner hates their nickname has kind, practical ways to talk about it.

Timing in a new relationship

Pet names tend to show up naturally as a relationship deepens. "Honey" is a fairly committed-sounding name for many people, more so than "babe" for some. If you've only been on a couple of dates, you might start with something lighter. Our guide on when to start using pet names talks through the signals.

Reading the room: five illustrative scenarios

Rules are easier to remember with examples. The people below are made up, purely to illustrate how the same word can land very differently.

Scenario 1: The long-married couple

Ruth and Carl (illustrative) have been married for decades. "Honey" is the word they use for each other without thinking, whether it's "Honey, the game's on" or "Night, honey." For them it isn't a big romantic statement. It's background warmth, like a hand on the shoulder. This is honey at its most natural: mutual, habitual and comfortable.

Scenario 2: The third date

Maya (illustrative) has been on three dates with Jordan. At the end of the third, Jordan says, "Text me when you get home, honey." Maya isn't sure how she feels. It's sweet, but it also feels a step ahead of where they are. Nothing's wrong here. It's just that honey signals a kind of settled closeness, and it can feel a bit fast early on. A lighter name, or just her name, might fit better for now.

Scenario 3: The new manager

A new team lead (illustrative) calls a junior coworker "honey" while handing back a report. He means it kindly. She hears it as being talked down to. This is exactly the situation dictionaries flag. At work, even well-meant pet names can blur professional lines, so it's best to stick with names.

Scenario 4: The diner

A server at a small-town diner (illustrative) asks every customer, "More coffee, hon?" Regulars love it. A few visitors find it a little too familiar. Here, honey is part of the local style rather than a personal statement. Even so, it's a good reminder that friendliness that feels natural in one place can feel odd to someone from somewhere else.

Scenario 5: The partner who'd rather not

Sam (illustrative) tells their partner that "honey" reminds them of a strict relative who used it sarcastically. Their partner switches to "sweet pea," which becomes a private joke between them. The lesson: the best pet name is the one your person actually enjoys hearing, and swapping one out is easy.

Honey phrases in everyday English

The pet name isn't the only way honey shows up in English. Because honey stood for sweetness for so long, it's woven into plenty of everyday phrases. Knowing them helps explain why the pet name feels so natural.

• Honeyed words. Speech that's sweet and flattering, sometimes too sweet. The verb "to honey," meaning to talk to someone flatteringly, is listed in dictionaries, and "honeyed" is its past form.
• Honey-tongued. Describes someone who speaks smoothly and persuasively. It can be a compliment or a gentle warning.
• Land of milk and honey. A place of plenty, borrowed from the biblical description of the Promised Land.
• Honeycomb. Chaucer's suitor used it as a pet name. Today it mostly describes the wax cells bees build, or any pattern that looks like them.
• Honeymoon. The sweet early stretch of a marriage, or any new beginning. Its history is a separate story with its own myths.
• Honey-do list. A playful American name for a list of household chores one partner asks the other to do, as in "Honey, do this; honey, do that."

Notice that the meanings split two ways. Some honey phrases mean genuine sweetness and warmth. Others hint at sweetness used to win someone over. The pet name lives firmly on the warm side, but that faint second meaning is one reason honey from a stranger can feel slippery rather than sweet.

Common myths and mix-ups about honey

A word this old collects some confusion. Here are a few things people often get wrong.

"Honey started as Southern slang."

No. The pet-name use is centuries older than the United States. Chaucer's characters used it in the 1300s, and Shakespeare's Othello used it with his new wife. It's true that it's especially common in parts of the American South today, but the South inherited it rather than inventing it.

"Hon is a separate word."

"Hon" is simply a shortened form of honey, the way "sweets" is short for "sweetie" or "sweetheart." It tends to feel even more casual than the full word.

"Honey is too old-fashioned to use."

It's old, but it isn't dated the way "pumpkin" or "dollface" might feel to some ears. Honey shows up in modern songs, TV shows and text messages. It's classic rather than old-fashioned.

"Honey and honeymoon come from the same idea."

They share the word "honey," and both draw on the sweetness of new love, but "honeymoon" has its own separate history, along with a popular myth about a month of honey wine. We're covering that story in a separate article on where the word honeymoon comes from.

"The Bible calls lovers honey."

Not exactly. The Song of Solomon compares a beloved's lips and words to honey and honeycomb, which is a comparison, not a pet name. But those famous lines surely helped keep the association between honey and love alive in English for centuries.

Honey around the world

English isn't alone in linking love with sweet foods, though each language does it its own way. Many languages have words for a loved one that literally mean "sweet" or "sweet one," and food-based pet names show up in lots of places. Rather than list translations we can't fully confirm here, we'll point you to our guide to pet names from around the world, which covers sweet-themed endearments in a range of languages.

What's striking is how universal the underlying idea seems to be: something sweet is something good, and someone good is someone sweet. Honey just happens to be one of the oldest and clearest ways English says it.

Try it yourself: making honey your own

If you like the warmth of honey but want something a little more personal, you can build on it. Here are a few simple methods, with illustrative examples.

Method 1: Add a little-word ending

English has a long habit of making names cuter with endings like "-bunch," "-bun," "-pie" and "-kins." Honey takes all of them: honeybunch, honey bun, honey pie. Pick the one that matches your partner's sense of humor.

Method 2: Pair it with something specific

Chaucer's Absolon paired "honeycomb" with "sweet Alisoun," the woman's actual name. You can do the same: "honey" plus a first name, or "honey" plus a detail only you share. For example (illustrative): a couple who met at a farmers' market might use "honey bee" as a private nod to that first meeting.

Method 3: Switch to a sweet cousin

If honey feels too common, try a relative from the same family: sweetheart, sweetie, sugar, sweet pea or darling. Each one carries the same message with a different tone.

Method 4: Save it for special moments

Some couples use a pet name so often it fades into the background. Others save a particular name for tender moments. Neither is wrong. If you notice "honey" has become automatic, you can always bring in a new name for notes, cards or anniversaries.

A quick self-check

• Does your partner smile, or wince, when you say it?
• Do they ever say it back?
• Does it fit the way you two talk, playful or tender?
• Would you be comfortable saying it in front of friends or family?

If the answers are mostly yes, honey is doing its job.

The bottom line on honey

We call people honey because, for most of history, honey was the sweetest thing anyone knew, and English has always used sweetness to talk about love. The word goes back to Old English hunig. It was already a pet name in Chaucer's time, it was good enough for Shakespeare's Othello, and it's still one of the most common affectionate words in English today. It sits in a big, friendly family alongside sweetheart, darling, sweetie and sugar, and like all of them, it works best with someone who's glad to hear it.

If you'd like help finding a pet name that feels a little more personal than honey, try the free nickname generator on our homepage. You pick who it's for (boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, fiancé or fiancée, crush or partner) and a vibe such as cute and sweet, romantic, funny, flirty, unique or classic. Each suggestion comes with a short note on why it works, and you can save favorites to a shortlist or blend your names with the Couple Name Mixer.

Honey Words and Phrases Side by Side

This table puts the honey phrases from the article next to each other, so you can see what each one means and how it feels.

Phrase	What it means	Good to know
Honeyed words	Speech that's sweet and flattering	Sometimes too sweet; the verb "to honey" means to talk to someone flatteringly
Honey-tongued	Someone who speaks smoothly and persuasively	Can be a compliment or a gentle warning
Land of milk and honey	A place of plenty	Borrowed from the biblical description of the Promised Land
Honeycomb	The wax cells bees build, or any pattern that looks like them	Chaucer's suitor used it as a pet name
Honeymoon	The sweet early stretch of a marriage, or any new beginning	Its history is a separate story with its own myths
Honey-do list	A list of household chores one partner asks the other to do	A playful American name

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do we call people honey?

We call people honey because honey was, for most of history, the sweetest thing people could taste, and English has long used sweetness as a way to talk about love and kindness. Calling someone honey says they're delightful and dear to you. The word itself comes from Old English hunig, and by Chaucer's time in the late 1300s, characters in his stories were already using honey words as pet names. It has stayed popular because it's short, warm and easy to say.

When did honey become a term of endearment?

The pet-name use of honey is at least as old as Middle English. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, written chiefly between 1387 and 1400, a suitor calls the woman he admires his honeycomb, and the narrator calls her a husband's honey dear. Those uses are dropped in casually, without explanation, which suggests readers already knew honey as an affectionate name. Shakespeare's Othello later calls his wife Desdemona honey, showing the word was natural for a husband to use.

Is it rude to call someone honey?

It depends on who you're talking to. With a partner, child or close friend who likes it, honey is warm and kind. With strangers, coworkers or people who work for you, it can come across as condescending. Dictionary.com notes that it can be offensive in those situations, especially when a man uses it toward a woman. Some regions and workplaces, like small-town diners, use it casually with customers, but many people still prefer not to be called honey by someone they don't know.

What's the difference between honey and sweetheart?

They're close cousins and often interchangeable. Honey tends to feel casual and everyday, the word you'd use when calling across the kitchen. Sweetheart feels a little more tender or old-fashioned, and it also works well as a description, as in my high school sweetheart. Sweetheart comes from Middle English swete herte, meaning sweet heart, and was first recorded between 1250 and 1300. Honey is older as a word, though its use as a pet name appears in writing a bit later.

Where does the word hon come from?

Hon is simply a clipped, shortened form of honey. English speakers love to trim affectionate words down, the same way sweetheart becomes sweets and sweetie. Hon usually feels even more casual than honey. It's common between couples and family members, and you'll also hear it from friendly servers and shopkeepers in some parts of the United States. Like honey, it works best with people who are comfortable with that level of familiarity.

Why are so many pet names based on sweet foods?

English has used sweet as a word for pleasant, kind and lovable for many centuries, so sweet foods make natural pet names. Honey, sugar, sweetie, cupcake and sweet pea all draw on that link. Researchers have even studied it: a 2015 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that people who had just tasted something sweet rated a hypothetical new relationship more favorably. The researchers began their paper by noting how often couples use words like sweetie and honey.

Is honey an old-fashioned nickname?

Honey is old, but it isn't dated. It has been used between lovers since at least Chaucer's day and is still one of the most common pet names in English. Some sweet names, like honeybunch or sugar pie, can sound playfully retro, but plain honey stays current because people of every age use it. It's in modern songs, films and text messages. If you want something fresher, you can personalize it, for example by pairing it with your partner's name.

Does the Bible call people honey?

Not as a pet name. The Bible uses honey as a picture of sweetness and abundance, as in the phrase a land flowing with milk and honey. In the Song of Solomon, a book of love poetry, the lover compares his bride's lips to honeycomb and says honey and milk are under her tongue. Those are comparisons rather than names. But because many English speakers grew up hearing these verses, they likely strengthened the link between honey and romantic love.

What can I call my partner instead of honey?

If honey feels too common, try another member of the sweet family: sweetheart, sweetie, sugar, sweet pea or darling. Darling is especially old, coming from Old English deorling, meaning little dear one. You can also make honey more personal by adding an ending, like honey bun or honey pie, or pairing it with a private joke. The free nickname generator on our homepage can suggest options by vibe, such as cute and sweet, romantic or classic.

Sources

We checked every source below while writing this guide. Last reviewed October 30, 2026, by Joan Ramos.

1. Honey (Dictionary.com)
2. Sweetheart (Dictionary.com)
3. Darling (Dictionary.com)
4. Sweetie (Dictionary.com)
5. Song of Solomon 4:11 (King James Version) (Bible Gateway)
6. The Canterbury Tales: The Miller's Tale (Middle English text) (University of Washington)
7. The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems by Geoffrey Chaucer (Project Gutenberg)
8. Othello, Act 2, Scene 1 (Folger Shakespeare Library)
9. Sweet Taste Preferences and Experiences Predict Prosocial Inferences, Personalities, and Behaviors (Meier et al., 2012) (Gettysburg College / Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)
10. Sweet love: The effects of sweet taste experience on initial romantic perceptions (Ren et al., 2015) (James Cook University / Journal of Social and Personal Relationships)