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A hickey, also known as love bite, is a bruise or bruise-like, dark red or purple mark caused by sucking or biting the skin of a person, usually their neck.^[1] While biting may be part of giving a hickey, sucking is sufficient to burst small superficial blood vessels under the skin to produce bruising. A hickey is sometimes used to mark someone as being the target of a partner’s romantic affection or as belonging to them. While mostly considered safe, there have been some reports of serious medical complications as a result of receiving hickeys, such as strokes, vascular^[2] or nerve damage^[3].

In a looser definition, the fourth-century Hindu text Kama Sutra contains references to biting with relation to kissing.^[4] “Love bite” as a term is first attested in 1749 in John Cleland‘s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.^[5] The later term ‘hickey’, originally used in American English and still predominantly in that dialect, is of unclear etymology.^[6] Some sources suggests that it derives from the earlier meaning of “pimple, skin lesion” (c. 1915), itself perhaps a sense extension of “small gadget, device; any unspecified object” (1909).^[7]