A matchmaker is someone who tries to bring two people together romantically, hoping they'll like each other and perhaps fall in love. Traditional matchmakers in many cultures made this their profession, carefully considering which people might make good partners based on their personalities, families, and goals. Even today, some matchmakers run businesses helping people find compatible partners.

The word also appears more casually when friends or family members play matchmaker. If your aunt keeps trying to set up two single friends at dinner parties, she's acting as a matchmaker. If a classmate thinks two other students would make a great pair and keeps suggesting they work together on projects, that's matchmaking too.

The term can extend beyond romance. A teacher might matchmake between a struggling student and a helpful tutor, or someone might matchmake between a person seeking a job and a company that's hiring. In these cases, matchmaker means connecting people who would benefit from knowing each other.

Some people are natural matchmakers who enjoy watching others connect and form relationships. Others find matchmaking annoying or intrusive. Whether matchmaking succeeds or not often depends on knowing the people involved well enough to sense whether they'd actually get along, rather than just thinking they should because they share one or two things in common.