paradise

• paradize (obsolete)

Middle English, from Old French, from Latin paradīsus, from Ancient Greek παράδεισος (parádeisos), ultimately from Avestan 𐬞𐬀𐬌𐬭𐬌⸱𐬛𐬀𐬉𐬰𐬀‎ (pairi daēza, “enclosure”). Cognate with Arabic فِرْدَوْس‎ (firdaws), an Iranian borrowing.

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• enPR: pă'rədīs, IPA^(key): /ˈpæɹədaɪs/, /ˈpɛɹədaɪs/

paradise (countable and uncountable, plural paradises)

1. (chiefly religion) The place where sanctified souls are believed to live after death.

   Synonym: Heaven

   Living in paradise comes with a price.

   • 1611, King James Version of the Bible, Luke 23.43,

     And Jesus said unto him [the malefactor], Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.

   • 1791, Charlotte Lennox, Hermione, London: William Lane, Volume 1, p. 123,

     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.

   • 1840, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Village Blacksmith” in Ballads and Other Poems, Cambridge: John Owen, 1842, p. 101,

     It sounds to him like her mother’s voice,

     Singing in Paradise!

   • 2004, Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, London: Virago, 2005, p. 189,

     I believe the soul in Paradise must enjoy something nearer to a perpetual adulthood than to any other state we know.

2. (Abrahamic religions) A garden where Adam and Eve first lived after being created.

   Synonym: Garden of Eden

   • c. 1589, William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3,

     Not that Adam that kept the Paradise but that Adam that keeps the prison:

   • 1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 9, lines 17-18,

     Up into Heav’n from Paradise in hast

     Th’ Angelic Guards ascended,

   • 1776, Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Philadelphia, p. 1,

     Government like dress is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.

   • 1851, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 132,

     I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.

3. (figuratively) A very pleasant place; a place full of lush vegetation.

   Synonym: heaven

   an island paradise in the Caribbean; a shoppers’ paradise

   • c. 1611, William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1,

     Let me live here ever;

     So rare a wonder’d father and a wife

     Makes this place Paradise.

   • 1789, Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, London: for the author, Volume 1, Chapter 6, p. 243,

     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.

   • 1883, Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 40,

     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.

   • 1968, Bessie Head, When Rain Clouds Gather, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969, Chapter 8, p. 114,

     “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. […] ”

4. (figuratively) A very pleasant experience.
   • c. 1604, William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act III, Scene 1,

     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.

   • 1847, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Chapter 23,

     […] 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.

   • 1979, Bernard Malamud, Dubin’s Lives, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, Chapter 2, p. 62,

     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.

5. (architecture, obsolete) An open space within a monastery or adjoining a church, such as the space within a cloister, the open court before a basilica, etc.[1]
6. (obsolete) A churchyard or cemetery.
7. (slang) The upper gallery in a theatre.

• parvis

• Abraham's bosom
• Arcadia
• Avalon
• Eden
• happy hunting ground
• kingdom come
• Nirvana
• Shangri-La
• sweet hereafter
• utopia

paradise (third-person singular simple present paradises, present participle paradising, simple past and past participle paradised)

1. To place (as) in paradise.

   Synonym: imparadise

   • 1623, Giles Fletcher, The Reward of the Faithfull, London: Benjamin Fisher, Part 2, Chapter 1, p. 141,

     Man himselfe […] euen then, when hee was first paradis’d in the Garden of pleasure, yet had something to doe in it, and was not suffered to walke idlely vp & downe like a Loyterer […]

   • 1632, Thomas Heywood, The Iron Age, London, Act IV, Scene 1,

     Hadst thou seene

     Her, in whose breast my heart was paradis’d,

     Kist, courted, and imbrac’d.

   • 1652, Edward Benlowes, Theophila, or, Loves Sacrifice, London: Henry Seile and Humphrey Moseley, Canto 7, stanza 81, p. 105,

     Yet dy’dst THOU not, but that (Spîrit quickned) free

     THOU might’st Saints Paradised see,

     Rejoyc’d Assurance give to Them rejoyc’d in THEE!

   • 1763, uncredited translator, “An Epistle of M. de Voltaire, upon his arrival at his estate near the Lake of Geneva, in March, 1755” in Francis Fawkes and William Woty (eds.), The Poetical Calendar, London: J. Coote, Volume 12, p. 48,

     […] blest thro’ every hour

     With blissful change of pleasure and of power,

     Couldst thou, thus paradis’d, from care remote,

     Rush to the world, and fight for Peter’s boat?

   • 1995, Anthony Burgess, Byrne, New York: Carroll & Graf, Part 2, p. 63,

     […] A near-nude dance of dates,

     Brilliant in darkness — 1617,

     Then 1500, and so back, gyrates

     To reach — harsh braking on the Time Machine —

     To 1321, anno felice

     For Dante, paradised with Beatrice.

2. (obsolete) To transform into a paradise.
   • 1593, Gabriel Harvey, Pierces Supererogation: Or A New Prayse of the Old Asse, London: Imprinted by Iohn Wolfe, OCLC 165778203; republished as John Payne Collier, editor, Pierces Supererogation: Or A New Prayse of the Old Asse. A Preparative to Certaine Larger Discourses, Intituled Nashes S. Fame (Miscellaneous Tracts. Temp. Eliz. & Jac. I; no. 8), [London: [s.n.], 1870], OCLC 23963073, page 177:

     […] come all the daintieſt dainties of this toungue, and doe homage to your verticall ſtarre, that hath all the ſoveraine influences of the eloquent and learned conſtellations at a becke, and paradiſeth the earth with the ambroſiall dewes of his incomprehenſible witt!

   • 1613, Thomas Heywood, “Epithalamion” in A Marriage Triumphe Solemnized in an Epithalamium, London: Edward Marchant,

     She enters with a sweet commanding grace,

     Her very presence paradic’d the place:

   • 1828, Ann Willson, letter to her brother, in Familiar Letters of Ann Willson, Philadelphia: Wm. D. Parrish & Co., 1850, pp. 84-85,

     Then let us individually aim at paradising the world, and these efforts, though feeble, would doubtless be blessed to ourselves […]

3. (obsolete, rare) To affect or exalt with visions of happiness.

   Synonyms: entrance, bewitch

   • 1606, John Marston, Parasitaster, or The Fawn, London: W. Cotton, Act IV,#*: O we had first some long fortunate greate Politicians that were so sottishlie paradized as to thinke when popular hate seconded Princes displeasure to them, any vnmerited violence could seeme to the world iniustice,

• Paradesi

paradīse

1. vocative singular of paradīsus