Melomaniac

//ˌmɛlə(ʊ)ˈmeɪnɪak// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    One with an abnormal fondness of music; a person who loves music.

    "He then amused himself with the fiddle—tried the French horn for a season, varying the matter by a few lessons upon the clarionet and hautboy, and finally improving his powers of endurance by a little practising of the Kent bugle. He at length became a perfect melomaniac, and was always in danger of being indicted as a nuisance by his less scientific neighbours, whose ears were doomed to suffer both by night and by day."

Example

More examples

"He then amused himself with the fiddle—tried the French horn for a season, varying the matter by a few lessons upon the clarionet and hautboy, and finally improving his powers of endurance by a little practising of the Kent bugle. He at length became a perfect melomaniac, and was always in danger of being indicted as a nuisance by his less scientific neighbours, whose ears were doomed to suffer both by night and by day."

Etymology

From melo- (prefix meaning “music”) (from Ancient Greek μέλος (mélos, “song; melody, tune”)) + -maniac (from French maniaque, from Late Latin maniacus, from Ancient Greek μανιακός (maniakós), an adjectival form of μανία (manía, “madness; mad desire, compulsion”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *men- (“to think”)).

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.