Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. All matter and energy, including the earth, the galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space, regarded as a whole.
- n. The earth together with all its inhabitants and created things.
- n. The human race.
- n. The sphere or realm in which something exists or takes place.
- n. Logic See universe of discourse.
- n. Statistics See population.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The totality of existing things; all that is in dynamical connection with general experience taken collectively—embracing the Creator and creation; or psychical and material objects, but excluding the Creator; or material objects only.
- n. The whole world; all mankind; all that meets us in experience, in a loose sense.
- n. In logic, the collection of all the objects to which any discourse refers: as, the universe of things. The things belonging to a universe cannot be defined or discriminated by any general characters; for every universal proposition excludes some general description of objects from the universe which had been supposed to be found in it. It is only in their dynamical connections that the objects of the universe can be distinguished from all others; and therefore no general term in a proposition can show what universe is meant; but an index is necessary. See
index , n., 2.
Wiktionary
- n. The sum of everything that exists in the cosmos, including time and space itself; same as the Universe.
- n. An entity similar to our Universe; one component of a larger entity known as the multiverse.
- n. Everything under consideration.
- n. An imaginary collection of worlds.
- n. Intense form of world in the sense of perspective or social setting.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. All created things viewed as constituting one system or whole; the whole body of things, or of phenomena; the to~ pa^n of the Greeks, the
mundus of the Latins; the world; creation.
WordNet 3.0
- n. everything that exists anywhere
- n. (statistics) the entire aggregation of items from which samples can be drawn
- n. everything stated or assumed in a given discussion
Etymologies
- From Old French univers, from Latin universum ("all things, as a whole, the universe"), neuter of universus ("all together, whole, entire, collective, general, literally turned or combined into one"), from uni-, combining form of unus ("one") + versus ("turned"), perfect passive participle of verto ("I turn"). (Wiktionary)
- Middle English, from Old French univers, from Latin ūniversum, from neuter of ūniversus, whole : ūnus, one; + versus, past participle of vertere, to turn. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Thus if the spherical-surface beings are living on a planet of which the solar system occupies only a negligibly small part of the spherical universe, they have no means of determining whether they are living in a finite or in an infinite universe, because the piece of universe to which they have access is in both cases practically plane, or Euclidean.”
Chapter 31. The Possibility of a “Finite” and Yet “Unbounded” Universe
“Specifically the notion that what we call our universe is a 4-dimensional space-time that itself is just a surface in a higher dimensional space, called a brane, a 4-brane in this case.”
Astronomers Find Black Holes Do Not Absorb Dark Matter | Universe Today
“The term universe in its complete physical sense applies to all matter in existence.”
“The word universe literally means everything that exists.”
“Since the universe is virtually transparent to radiation of these wavelengths, nothing would really have happened to it: the radiation would expand in universe at the same rate as the universe is expanding.”
“When we began to realize that there were other such vast aggregations of stars, we called them "island universes," but this was an obvious misnomer; since the word universe means everything there is, it can hardly have a plural.”
“Now Hoyle may have been wrong about the steady state theory – the very term "big bang" as used to describe the beginning of the universe is his own dismissive phrase for what he regarded as a poor alternative theory – but he was no fool otherwise, and it was only his own argumentative and bloody-minded character, it is said, that prevented him from winning the Nobel prize.”
“Even if our universe is a random accident, we still want to believe that it must have been caused by the deterministic laws that govern it.”
The Huffington Post: Santhosh Mathew, PhD: Can We Predict the Future of the Stars?
“Still, it's not like the universe is always asking Superman to be a villain.”
“The nature of the universe is a point of interest to many of us and I note on this thread that Pixie and others have expressed surprise at the notion of an infinite universe.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘universe’.
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steffany(grade 2)
accident, agree, arrive, astronomy, attention, award, aware, balance, banner, bare, base, beach and 127 more...
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jackgrade2
accident, agree, arrive, astronomy, atlas, attention, award, aware, balance, banner, bare, base and 127 more...
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the curious incident of the dog in th...
words from a novel by mark haddon
dog, garden fork, Wellington, prime, maths, clench, The Hound of the ..., police, dead, bread-slicing mac..., groaning, drawn and 126 more...
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FUN - Beatles song titles
Typical words from Beatles song titles. Can you recreate the titles?
(Grammatical words have been omitted)polythene, Sun King, rhythm and blues, taxman, tripper, monkey business, mailman, matchbox, rock and roll, ooh, blue jay, reprise and 388 more...
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SCIE - statistics
a priori probability, Abbe-Helmert crit..., absolute error, absolutely unbias..., accuracy, ACF, affinity, AIC, algorithm, allometry, alphabet, anomic and 4171 more...
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Nature and Environment
north, east, west, mountain, sea, beach, river, northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest, island and 205 more...
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Doctor Who
Dalek, Time-Lord, timey-wimey, TARDIS, Cyberman, sonic, sonic screwdriver, Ood, universe, end of time, Big Bang, K-9 and 3 more...
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[Uni][verse]
to be used.
windfall, alkahest, tektite, cislunar, conatus, pansophy, universe, macrocosm, perfect storm, star-scattered, cynosure, stellate and 22 more...
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Impossible wind-up toys
the blob, jellyfish, cooked okra, phlogiston, blancmange, plasma, Jell-O, umbrage, wind, vowel, Portuguese man o'..., shoggoth and 4 more...
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My favorites
foible, sidereal, amygdala, woodnote, cogitate, silvern, ollalieberry, ramify, diaphanous, surreality, myopia, subcelestial and 75 more...
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Verses
inverse, reverse, universe, obverse, adverse, averse, converse, bouleversement, diverse, overseas, oversee, oversew and 20 more...
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bootload's Words
grouse, beaut, ripper, gassit, hack, hacking, twit, spon, goon, rosella, magpie, galah and 184 more...
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science (collective opinion)
random scientific terms from a group of one hundred 16-18 year olds to choose 100 words that, in their collective opinion, represent crucial factors and concepts influencing trends in science today...
acid, base, aggregation status, analysis, antimatter, apparatus, atmosphere, atom, bacteria, Big Bang, biodiversity, bioethics and 90 more...
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Wordnik Words
Words that appear on the home page of Wordnik.
abaci, cabooleat, endomorphic, warfinger, varna, tautological, quesadillia, hub, oceanography, ken, ignimbrite, galactagogue and 110 more...
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Basic English Vocabulary
Very basic words for ESL students.
contemplate, container, consumer, consultant, consensus, conscious, conscience, connection, confusion, confront, conflict, confident and 4334 more...
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Favorite Words of AWP13
We asked attendees who visited the Wordnik booth what their favorite words were, and these are what they told us. (AWP is an annual conference for writers and those in the writing world.)
cling, declivity, susurrus, caramel, cataract, please, fester, reverie, kerplunk!, defenestration, colonel, ocean and 174 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for universe.
raavan universe is a mystery Feb 9, 2010
seanahan There is this book about how English is really based on Biblical Hebrew starting in the garden of Eden, The Word: The Dictionary That Reveals The Hebrew Source of English (Paperback). It might interest some of us here. As far as I can tell without having read it, it is complete crap. Jan 7, 2009
tbtabby Kent Hovind once claimed that this word means "single spoken sentence" as "proof" of a Biblical creation. I guess after mangling all known fields of science, he decided to tackle etymology. Jan 4, 2009
reesetee "In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time."
--Edward P. Tryon
Sep 25, 2007