A term of endearment is a word or phrase used to address or describe a person, animal or inanimate object for which the speaker feels love or affection.
Each term of endearment has its own connotations, which are highly dependent on the situation they are used in, such as tone of voice, body language, and social context.
[3] Terms of endearment often '"make use of internal rhyme...[with] still current forms such as lovey-dovey, which appeared in 1819, and honey bunny",[4] or of other duplications.
This is described by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan: The "opacity of the ejaculations of love, when, lacking a signifier to name the object of its epithalamium, it employs the crudest trickery of the imaginary.
[7] Berne points out that "the more tense the situation, and the closer the game is to exposure, the more bitterly is the word 'sweetheart' enunciated"; while the wife's antithesis is either '"to reply: 'Yes, honey!'"