Greek love is a relatively moern coinage (generally placed within quotation marks) intended as a reference to male bonding and intimate relations between males as practised in ancient Greece, as well as to its application and expression in more recent times, particularly in a 19th-century European context (aee "Scholarly Examples of Its Use" below). The term is thus a synonym for pederasty, though it has also been loosely applied to homosexual behaviour in general.