paradise
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: enpr: părʹədīs
ipa: /ˈpæ.ɹə.daɪs/
ipa: /ˈpɛɹ.ə.daɪs/
rhymes: -aɪs
Forms: form: paradises
form: paradize
Etymology: From Middle English paradis, paradise, paradys, from Late Old English paradīs, borrowed from Old French paradis, from Latin paradīsus, from Ancient Greek παράδεισος (parádeisos), ultimately from Proto-Iranian *paridayjah. Doublet of parvis. Displaced Old English neorxnawang.
Senses: examples: text: Living in paradise comes with a price.
text: And Jesus said unto him [the malefactor], Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.
ref: 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Luke 23:43:
text: This employment I considered as the only satisfaction I could offer to the memory of your unfortunate mother, and I flatter myself that if she could look down, it would give her angelic mind pleasure even in paradise, to behold me instilling into the minds of her children, sentiments congenial with her own.
ref: 1791, Charlotte Lennox, “Hermione”, in London, volume 1, William Lane, page 123:
text: The imagination of the Hindoo paints his Swergas as "profuse of bliss," and all the joys of sense are collected in the Paradise of the Mussulman.
ref: 1828, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, volume I, London: William Harrison Ainsworth, page 71:
text: He hears his daughter's voice, / Singing in the village choir, / And it makes his heart rejoice. / It sounds to him like her mother's voice, / Singing in Paradise!
ref: 1839, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “[Miscellaneous.] w:The Village Blacksmith.”, in Ballads and Other Poems, 2nd edition, Cambridge, Mass.: […] John Owen, published 1842, →OCLC, stanzas 5–6, page 101:
text: I believe the soul in Paradise must enjoy something nearer to a perpetual adulthood than to any other state we know.
ref: 2004, Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, London: Virago, published 2005, page 189:
text: Kruban is a tidally-locked Venusian hothouse, its surface perpetually obscured by clouds of sulfur and carbon dioxides. The first group of krogan brought into orbit by the salarian uplift teams requested a trip to Kruban. The salarians at first thought the krogan were confused about the nature of Kruban's environment; the planet is named for a krogan mythological paradise in which honorable warriors feast on the internal organs of their enemies. In fact, krogan astronomers had correctly deduced the nature of Kruban in the years before the global holocaust.
ref: 2010, BioWare, Mass Effect 2 (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →OCLC, PC, scene: Kruban:
topics: lifestyle
religion
synonyms: Heaven
glosses: The place where sanctified souls are believed to live after death.
examples: text: Not that Adam that kept the Paradise but that Adam that keeps the prison:
ref: c. 1594 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Comedie of Errors”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene iii]:
text: Up into Heav’n from Paradise in hast
Th’ Angelic Guards ascended,
ref: 1667, John Milton, “Book IX”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC, lines 17-18:
text: Government like dress is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.
ref: 1776, Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Philadelphia, page 1:
text: If all was good and fair we met,
⁠This earth had been the Paradise
⁠It never look’d to human eyes
Since Adam left his garden yet.
ref: 1850, [Alfred, Lord Tennyson], “Canto XXIV”, in In Memoriam, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page 41:
text: I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.
ref: 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 132, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:
topics: Abrahamic-religions
lifestyle
religion
synonyms: Garden of Eden
glosses: A garden where Adam and Eve first lived after being created.
examples: text: an island paradise in the Caribbean
text: Let me live here ever;
So rare a wonder’d father and a wife
Makes this place Paradise.
ref: 1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene i]:
text: The reader cannot but judge of the irksomeness of this situation to a mind like mine, in being daily exposed to new hardships and impositions, after having seen many better days, and been as it were, in a state of freedom and plenty; added to which, every part of the world I had hitherto been in, seemed to me a paradise in comparison of the West Indies.
ref: 1789, Olaudah Equiano, chapter 6, in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, volume 1, London: for the author, page 243:
text: “Each household will have to have a tap with water running out of it all the year round,” he said. “And not only palm trees, but fruit trees too and flower gardens. It won’t take so many years to turn Golema Mmidi into a paradise. […]”
ref: 1968, Bessie Head, chapter 8, in When Rain Clouds Gather, New York: Simon & Schuster, published 1969, page 114:
text: On Earth, there is no poverty, no crime, no war. You look out the window of Starfleet Headquarters and you see paradise. Well, it's easy to be a saint in paradise, but the Maquis do not live in paradise.
ref: 1994, Ira Steven Behr, “The Maquis, Part II”, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 2, episode 21, spoken by Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks):
synonyms: heaven
glosses: A very pleasant place, such as a place full of lush vegetation.
examples: text: a shoppers’ paradise
text: And at this point, also, begins the pilot’s paradise: a wide river hence to New Orleans, abundance of water from shore to shore, and no bars, snags, sawyers, or wrecks in his road.
ref: 1883, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter 40, in Life on the Mississippi, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company, →OCLC:
text: But the idea that Singapore is a deregulated paradise is not borne out by reality, as anyone who has tried to dispose of a piece of used chewing gum there will know.
ref: 2019 December 17, Howard Davies, “Will the UK really turn into 'Singapore-on-Thames' after Brexit?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
glosses: An ideal place for a specified type of person, activity, etc.
examples: text: The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
ref: c. 1603–1604 (date written), William Shakespeare, “Measure for Measure”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene i]:
text: […] sitting by him, roused from the nightmare of parting—called to the paradise of union—I thought only of the bliss given me to drink in so abundant a flow.
ref: 1847 October 16, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], chapter VIII, in Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. […], volume II, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, page 214:
text: He poured the last of the wine as Fanny, her face composed as she stroked his leg, after a paradise of expectation touched his aroused organ.
ref: 1979, Bernard Malamud, chapter 2, in Dubin’s Lives, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, page 62:
glosses: A very pleasant experience.
topics: architecture
glosses: An open space within a monastery or adjoining a church, such as the space within a cloister, the open court before a basilica, etc.
glosses: A churchyard or cemetery.
glosses: The upper gallery in a theatre.
examples: text: She was learned in decocting all kinds of herb-tea, infallible in curing burns, sprains, and scalds; and not a few pennyworths of gingerbread and paradise (for the latter she was very famous) went among her young customers, for which the till was never the richer.
ref: 1832, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Heath's Book of Beauty, 1833, The Knife, page 127:
glosses: A cake, often as a paradise slice.
Synonyms: word: heaven
word: Eden
word: Shangri-La
word: Peach Blossom Spring
word: utopia
word: Arcadia
word: Arcady
word: Avalon
word: kingdom come
word: nirvana
word: sweet hereafter
word: happy hunting ground
Derived terms: another day in paradise
bird of paradise
disparadise
disparadised
earthly paradise
eastern paradise whydah
emparadise
fool's paradise
grain of paradise
grains of paradise
imparadise
long-tailed paradise whydah
magnificent bird of paradise
paradisaic
paradisaical
paradisal
paradisean
paradise crane
paradise-crow
paradise duck
paradisefish
paradise flycatcher
Paradise Island
paradise nut
paradise on Earth
paradise on earth
paradise parrot
paradise shelduck
paradise skipper
paradise sugar
paradisiac
paradisiacal
paradisial
paradisian
paradisic
paradisical
paradol
Surfers Paradise
trouble in paradise
unparadise
workers' paradise
Related terms: Abraham's bosom
Arcadia
Avalon
Eden
happy hunting ground
kingdom come
nirvana
Shangri-La
sweet hereafter
utopia