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deity

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
See also: $DEITY

English

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English Wikipedia has an article on:
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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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From Middle French deité, from Latin deitās.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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deity (countable and uncountable, plural deities)

  1. Synonym of divinity: the state, position, or fact of being a god. [from 14th c.]
    • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto X”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, page 4:
      Thou seest all, yet none at all sees thee: / All that is by the working of thy Deitee.
    • 1892, Australian Essays, page 107:
      “[...] The Trinity—the Atonement—the Deity of Christ—are to him ‘mere crude superstitions which disfigure and obscure pure and true religion.’ It never seems to have occurred to him that, although these doctrines may be empty formulæ to him, they were and are passionate realities to others.”
      “That is very true.”
      “He will talk with the same ignorance of what he would call Jesuolatry as a Protestant will of what he calls Mariolatry, neither he nor the Protestant understanding any more of a deep spiritual truth than its cut-and-dried dogmatical letter.”
  2. A supernatural divine being; a god or goddess. [from 14th c.]
    • 1941, George Ryley Scott, Phallic Worship: A History of Sex and Sex Rites in Relation to the Religions of All Races from Antiquity to the Present Day, London: T. Werner Laurie, page 15:
      The fact that in most lands the moon was originally a female deity has led many historians to dispute the superiority of the moon over the sun in ancient mythology.
    • 1961, Harry E. Wedeck, Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs, New York: The Citadel Press, page 209:
      Every act of a Roman, from birth to death, from dawn to night, was controlled and supervised by some presiding deity.
    • 2000, Kenneth Seeskin, Searching for a Distant God: The Legacy of Maimonides, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 23:
      The crux of monotheism is not only belief in a single deity but belief in a deity who is different from everything else.

Synonyms

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Hyponyms

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Derived terms

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Translations

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Translations to be checked

See also

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References

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  1. ^ The American Heritage Book of English Usage: A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1996, →ISBN

Anagrams

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