Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Having the nature of or being a deity.
  • adjective Of, relating to, emanating from, or being the expression of a deity.
  • adjective Being in the service or worship of a deity; sacred.
  • adjective Superhuman; godlike.
  • adjective Supremely good or beautiful; magnificent.
  • adjective Extremely pleasant; delightful.
  • noun A cleric.
  • noun A theologian.
  • intransitive verb To foretell, especially by divination. synonym: foretell.
  • intransitive verb To guess or know by inspiration or intuition.
  • intransitive verb To locate (underground water or minerals) with a divining rod; douse.
  • intransitive verb To practice divination.
  • intransitive verb To guess.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To learn or make out by or as if by divination; foretell; presage.
  • To make out by observation or otherwise; conjecture; guess.
  • To render divine; deify; consecrate; sanctify.
  • Synonyms To prognosticate, predict, prophesy.
  • To see through, penetrate.
  • To use or practise divination.
  • To afford or impart presages of the future; utter presages or prognostications.
  • To have presages or forebodings.
  • To make a guess or conjecture: as, you have divined rightly.
  • 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.
  • Addressed or appropriated to God; religious; sacred: as, divine worship; divine service, songs, or ascriptions.
  • Godlike; heavenly; excellent in the highest degree; extraordinary; apparently above what is human.
  • Divining; presageful; foreboding; prescient.
  • Relating to divinity or theology.
  • 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.
  • Synonyms Holy, sacred.
  • Supernatural, superhuman.
  • noun A man skilled in divinity; a theologian: as, a great divine; “the Revelation of St. John the Divine.
  • noun A minister of the gospel; a priest; a clergyman.
  • noun A diviner; a prophet.
  • noun Divinity.
  • noun Synonyms Clergyman, Priest, etc. See minister, n.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Of or belonging to God
  • adjective Proceeding from God.
  • adjective Appropriated to God, or celebrating his praise; religious; pious; holy
  • adjective Pertaining to, or proceeding from, a deity; partaking of the nature of a god or the gods.
  • adjective Godlike; heavenly; excellent in the highest degree; supremely admirable; apparently above what is human. In this application, the word admits of comparison.
  • adjective obsolete Presageful; foreboding; prescient.
  • adjective Relating to divinity or theology.
  • transitive verb To foresee or foreknow; to detect; to anticipate; to conjecture.
  • transitive verb To foretell; to predict; to presage.
  • transitive verb obsolete To render divine; to deify.
  • noun One skilled in divinity; a theologian.
  • noun A minister of the gospel; a priest; a clergyman.
  • intransitive verb To use or practice divination; to foretell by divination; to utter prognostications.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[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.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old French devin, from Latin dīvīnus, from divus ("god").

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle French deviner, from Latin divino.

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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.

    Picnic 2009

  • _ 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 Paul Henri Thiry Holbach 1756

  • 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 Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon 1682

  • 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 1852

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

    No and Yes Mary Baker Eddy 1865

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

    Archive 2007-04-01 Hal Duncan 2007

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

    A Response to a Response Hal Duncan 2007

  • 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 Hal Duncan 2007

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

    Anne Naylor: 5 Creative Ways To Pursue Your Passion 2009

  • 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 2009

  • There are historically Black sororities, known as the Divine Nine, which boast alumni such as Kamala Harris (Alpha Kappa Alpha), Shirley Chisholm (Delta Sigma Theta), and Dionne Warwick (Zeta Phi Beta).

    ‘I told her: your TikToks are cringe’ – the consultants who get teens into elite sororities Alaina Demopoulos 2023

Comments

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  • 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

    December 9, 2006

  • To err is human, to forgive, divine.

    December 9, 2006

  • Used for Summer 12 MAY 11

    May 14, 2011

  • "Will not deliver", in the jargon of railroad telegraphy. --US Railway Association, Standard Cipher Code, 1906.

    January 22, 2013