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Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. adj. Having the nature of or being a deity.
  2. adj. Of, relating to, emanating from, or being the expression of a deity: sought divine guidance through meditation.
  3. adj. Being in the service or worship of a deity; sacred.
  4. adj. Superhuman; godlike.
  5. adj. Supremely good or beautiful; magnificent: a divine performance of the concerto.
  6. adj. Extremely pleasant; delightful: had a divine time at the ball.
  7. adj. Heavenly; perfect.
  8. n. A cleric.
  9. n. A theologian.
  10. v. To foretell through or as if through the art of divination. See Synonyms at foretell.
  11. v. To know by inspiration, intuition, or reflection.
  12. v. To guess.
  13. v. To locate (underground water or minerals) with a divining rod; douse.
  14. v. To practice divination.
  15. v. To guess.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. Pertaining to, of the nature of, or proceeding from God, or a god or heathen deity: as, divine perfections; divine judgments; the divine honors paid to the Roman emperors; a being half human, half divine; divine oracles.
  2. Addressed or appropriated to God; religious; sacred: as, divine worship; divine service, songs, or ascriptions.
  3. Godlike; heavenly; excellent in the highest degree; extraordinary; apparently above what is human.
  4. Divining; presageful; foreboding; prescient.
  5. Relating to divinity or theology.
  6. Of the clergy, a claim of divine authority for particular persons and particular forms of ecclesiastical government. An instance in the Roman Catholic Church is the still unsettled claim of the bishops to power in their several dioceses, as opposed to the papal theory that they rule mediately through the pope.
  7. Synonyms Holy, sacred.
  8. Supernatural, superhuman.
  9. n. A man skilled in divinity; a theologian: as, a great divine; “the Revelation of St. John the Divine.”
  10. n. A minister of the gospel; a priest; a clergyman.
  11. n. A diviner; a prophet.
  12. n. Divinity.
  13. n. Synonyms Clergyman, Priest, etc. See minister, n.
  14. To learn or make out by or as if by divination; foretell; presage.
  15. To make out by observation or otherwise; conjecture; guess.
  16. To render divine; deify; consecrate; sanctify.
  17. Synonyms To prognosticate, predict, prophesy.
  18. To see through, penetrate.
  19. To use or practise divination.
  20. To afford or impart presages of the future; utter presages or prognostications.
  21. To have presages or forebodings.
  22. To make a guess or conjecture: as, you have divined rightly.

Wiktionary

  1. adj. of or pertaining to a god
  2. adj. eternal, holy, or otherwise supernatural.
  3. adj. of superhuman or surpassing excellence
  4. adj. beautiful, heavenly
  5. n. a theologian or cleric
  6. n. a metaphor for a deity, especially the Christian one.
  7. v. to foretell (something), especially by the use of divination
  8. v. to guess (something)
  9. v. to search for (underground objects or water) using a divining rod

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. adj. Of or belonging to God
  2. adj. Proceeding from God.
  3. adj. Appropriated to God, or celebrating his praise; religious; pious; holy.
  4. adj. Pertaining to, or proceeding from, a deity; partaking of the nature of a god or the gods.
  5. adj. Godlike; heavenly; excellent in the highest degree; supremely admirable; apparently above what is human. In this application, the word admits of comparison.
  6. adj. Presageful; foreboding; prescient.
  7. adj. Relating to divinity or theology.
  8. n. One skilled in divinity; a theologian.
  9. n. A minister of the gospel; a priest; a clergyman.
  10. v. To foresee or foreknow; to detect; to anticipate; to conjecture.
  11. v. To foretell; to predict; to presage.
  12. v. To render divine; to deify.
  13. v. To use or practice divination; to foretell by divination; to utter prognostications.
  14. v. To have or feel a presage or foreboding.
  15. v. To conjecture or guess.

WordNet 3.0

  1. adj. appropriate to or befitting a god
  2. adj. being of such surpassing excellence as to suggest inspiration by the gods
  3. adj. being or having the nature of a god
  4. n. a clergyman or other person in religious orders
  5. adj. devoted to or in the service or worship of a deity
  6. n. terms referring to the Judeo-Christian God
  7. adj. emanating from God
  8. v. perceive intuitively or through some inexplicable perceptive powers
  9. adj. resulting from divine providence
  10. v. search by divining, as if with a rod

Etymologies

  1. Middle English, from Old French devine, from Latin dīvīnus, divine, foreseeing, from dīvus, god; see dyeu- in Indo-European roots. V., Middle English divinen, from Old French deviner, from Latin dīvīnāre, from dīvīnus.

Examples

  • “According to this interpretation, the phrase “the nature of the divine and the good” refers simply to a characteristic that is attributed to Pyrrho, and labeled by poetic hyperbole as ˜divine™, in another fragment of Timon, namely his extraordinary tranquillity; the couplet as a whole, then, is saying that tranquillity is the source of an even-tempered life.”

    Fictionaut: Picnic

  • “_ It should appear that Moses believed with the Egyptians the divine emanation of souls: according to him, _ "God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul:" _ nevertheless, the Catholic, at this day, rejects this system of _divine emanation, _ seeing that it supposes the”

    The System of Nature, Volume 1

  • “Actions committed by a divine principle are _divine actions_; whereas the actions of the creature, however good they may appear, are”

    A Short Method Of Prayer

  • “Empedocles, and others, to prove there must be something self-existent and eternal, or in other words, "that nothing which once was not can ever of itself come into being," he uses it to disprove a divine creation, and even presents the maxim in an altered form -- viz., "nothing is ever _divinely_ generated from nothing;" [787] and he thence concludes that the world was by no means made for us by _divine_ power. [”

    Christianity and Greek Philosophy or, the relation between spontaneous and reflective thought in Greece and the positive teaching of Christ and His Apostles

  • “When the term divine Principle is used to signify Deity it may seem distant or cold, until better apprehended.”

    No and Yes

  • “Your creative centre is the source of what I call divine guidance.”

    Anne Naylor: 5 Creative Ways To Pursue Your Passion

  • “And the rest is what we call divine creative coincidence.”

    Stacie Krajchir: Dear Hollywood: Meet Four Industry Guys Who Left Los Angeles And Found Their Heartstrings In The Middle Of A Homeless Camp In Denver

  • “Surely the physical definition implicit in ascribing masculinity to the divine is a contradiction of omnipotence in and of itself.”

    Archive 2007-04-01

  • “To ascribe features of masculinity to the divine is as blasphemous as to ascribe features of bestiality -- as in the theriomorphic deities of pagan religions so abhorred by monotheism -- the very blasphemy that iconoclasm reacts against.”

    A Response to a Response

  • “In 2003, Wanda quit on her own after what she calls a divine intervention that hit her on the way to buy drugs.”

    CNN Transcript Nov 5, 2009

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  • justBear Used for Summer 12 MAY 11 May 14, 2011

  • seanahan To err is human, to forgive, divine. Dec 9, 2006

  • brtom It is also not consistent with the reality of the soul to admit that there is anything in the known universe more divine than men and women. Whitman, Preface 1855 Dec 9, 2006

‘divine’ has been looked up 3021 times, loved by 6 people, added to 60 lists, commented on 3 times, and has a Scrabble score of 10.