Definitions

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

  • noun The state of being transported by a lofty emotion; ecstasy.
  • noun An expression of ecstatic feeling.
  • noun The transporting of a person from one place to another, especially to heaven, by supernatural means.
  • noun An event in the eschatology of certain Christian groups in which believers in Christ will be taken up to heaven either prior to or at the Second Coming.
  • transitive verb To enrapture.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A violent taking and carrying away; seizure; forcible removal.
  • noun Violent transporting movement; a rapid carrying or going along; moving energy.
  • noun A state of mental transport or exaltation; ecstasy.
  • noun Ecstatic elevation of thought or feeling; lofty or soaring enthusiasm; exalted or absorbing earnestness.
  • noun A manifestation of mental transport; an ecstatic utterance or action; an expression of exalted or passionate feeling of any kind; a rhapsody.
  • noun An ecstasy of passionate excitement; a paroxysm or fit from excessive emotion.
  • noun Synonyms Transport, bliss, exaltation.
  • To enrapture.

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

  • noun obsolete A seizing by violence; a hurrying along; rapidity with violence.
  • noun The state or condition of being rapt, or carried away from one's self by agreeable excitement; violence of a pleasing passion; extreme joy or pleasure; ecstasy.
  • noun obsolete A spasm; a fit; a syncope; delirium.
  • transitive verb Poetic To transport with excitement; to enrapture.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Extreme pleasure, happiness or excitement.
  • noun In some forms of fundamentalist Protestant eschatology, the event when Jesus returns and gathers the souls of living believers. (Usually "the rapture.")
  • noun obsolete The act of kidnapping or abducting, especially the forceful carrying off of a woman.
  • noun obsolete Rape; ravishment; sexual violation.
  • noun obsolete The act of carrying, conveying, transporting or sweeping along by force of movement; the force of such movement; the fact of being carried along by such movement.
  • verb dated, intransitive to experience great happiness or excitement
  • verb dated, transitive to cause to experience great happiness or excitement
  • verb rare to take part in the Rapture

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a state of elated bliss
  • noun a state of being carried away by overwhelming emotion

Etymologies

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

[Obsolete French, abduction, carrying off, from rapt, carried away, from Old French rat, from Latin raptus; see rapt.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Latin raptūra, future active participle of rapiō ("snatch, carry off")

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Examples

Comments

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  • "Ed Kalnins is Sarah Palin's former pastor at the Wasilla Assembly of God Church which she attended for 26 years. He sees powerful signs that the end of the world is drawing nigh and assured a London Times reporter that Biblical scripture specifically mentions shortages of oil and wars for its control. When the end comes, he expects to be raptured with other righteous Christians and spared the suffering of those of us who will be left behind."

    - Chip Ward, 'The Evolution of John McCain: Why He Picked Sarah Palin, Carbon Queen', 21 Sep 2008.

    September 22, 2008

  • I too look forward to the rapture, and expect to be spared the yammering nonsense of righteous theists. Take them away, oh lord!

    September 22, 2008

  • SCARECROW

    The sum of the square roots of any two

    sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to

    the square root of the remaining side. Oh

    joy, rapture! I've got a brain!

    June 11, 2010

  • While the sudden plunge tore us out of our bodies and for an unmeasurable moment returned us to the thing that wasn't God but the aspect of him that was ours, and in which infinitely generous archetype there was neither her nor me but only the rapture that calls you home to unity with the sweetest song and painlessly burns away the straps and buckles of the suffering self. bliss. From "The Last Werewolf" by Glen Duncan.

    March 18, 2012