paradise

• paradize (obsolete)

From Middle English paradis, paradise, paradys, from Late Old English paradīs, borrowed from Old French paradis, from Latin paradīsus, from Ancient Greek παράδεισος (parádeisos), ultimately from Proto-Iranian *paridayjah. Doublet of parvis. Displaced Old English neorxnawang.

• (Received Pronunciation, New York City) enPR: părʹədīs, IPA^(key): /ˈpæɹ.ə.daɪs/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈpɛɹ.ə.daɪs/

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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, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, 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”, in London‎^[2], volume 1, William Lane, page 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.

   • 1828, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, volume I, London: William Harrison Ainsworth, page 71:

     The imagination of the Hindoo paints his Swergas as "profuse of bliss," and all the joys of sense are collected in the Paradise of the Mussulman.

   • 1839, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “[Miscellaneous.] The Village Blacksmith.”, in Ballads and Other Poems, 2nd edition, Cambridge, Mass.: […] John Owen, published 1842, →OCLC, stanzas 5–6, page 101:

     He hears his daughter's voice, / Singing in the village choir, / And it makes his heart rejoice. / It sounds to him like her mother's voice, / Singing in Paradise!

   • 2004, Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, London: Virago, published 2005, page 189:

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

   • 2010, BioWare, Mass Effect 2 (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →OCLC, PC, scene: Kruban:

     Kruban is a tidally-locked Venusian hothouse, its surface perpetually obscured by clouds of sulfur and carbon dioxides. The first group of krogan brought into orbit by the salarian uplift teams requested a trip to Kruban. The salarians at first thought the krogan were confused about the nature of Kruban's environment; the planet is named for a krogan mythological paradise in which honorable warriors feast on the internal organs of their enemies. In fact, krogan astronomers had correctly deduced the nature of Kruban in the years before the global holocaust.

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

   Synonym: Garden of Eden

   • c. 1594 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Comedie of Errors”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene iii]:

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

   • 1667, John Milton, “Book IX”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC, lines 17-18:

     Up into Heav’n from Paradise in hast
     Th’ Angelic Guards ascended,

   • 1776, Thomas Paine, Common Sense‎^[3], Philadelphia, page 1:

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

   • 1850, [Alfred, Lord Tennyson], In Memoriam, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, Canto XXIV, page 41:

     If all was good and fair we met,
     ⁠This earth had been the Paradise
     ⁠It never look’d to human eyes
     Since Adam left his garden yet.

   • 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 132, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:

     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, such as a place full of lush vegetation.

   Synonym: heaven

   an island paradise in the Caribbean

   • 1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene i]:

     Let me live here ever;
     So rare a wonder’d father and a wife
     Makes this place Paradise.

   • 1789, Olaudah Equiano, chapter 6, in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano‎^[4], volume 1, London: for the author, page 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.

   • 1968, Bessie Head, chapter 8, in When Rain Clouds Gather‎^[5], New York: Simon & Schuster, published 1969, page 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. […] ”

   • 1994, Ira Steven Behr, “The Maquis, Part II”, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 2, episode 21, spoken by Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks):

     On Earth, there is no poverty, no crime, no war. You look out the window of Starfleet Headquarters and you see paradise. Well, it's easy to be a saint in paradise, but the Maquis do not live in paradise.

4. (figuratively) An ideal place for a specified type of person, activity, etc.

   a shoppers’ paradise

   • 1883, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter 40, in Life on the Mississippi, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company, →OCLC:

     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.

   • 2019 December 17, Howard Davies, “Will the UK really turn into 'Singapore-on-Thames' after Brexit?”, in The Guardian‎^[6], →ISSN:

     But the idea that Singapore is a deregulated paradise is not borne out by reality, as anyone who has tried to dispose of a piece of used chewing gum there will know.

5. (figuratively) A very pleasant experience.
   • c. 1603–1604 (date written), William Shakespeare, “Measure for Measure”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene i]:

     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 October 16, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], chapter VIII, in Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. […], volume II, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, page 214:

     […] 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, chapter 2, in Dubin’s Lives‎^[7], New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, page 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.

6. (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]
7. (obsolete) A churchyard or cemetery.
8. (slang) The upper gallery in a theatre.
9. A cake, often as a paradise slice.
   • 1832, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Heath's Book of Beauty, 1833, The Knife, page 127:

     She was learned in decocting all kinds of herb-tea, infallible in curing burns, sprains, and scalds; and not a few pennyworths of gingerbread and paradise (for the latter she was very famous) went among her young customers, for which the till was never the richer.

• → Fijian: parataisi
• → Maori: pararaiia
• → Niuean: parataiso
• → Tokelauan: palataiho

• 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^[8], 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^[9], 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,^[10]

     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,^[11]

     […] 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^[12], 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: […] Iohn Wolfe, →OCLC; 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, 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,^[13]

     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,^[14]

     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,^[15]#*: 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

Borrowed from English paradise.

• IPA^(key): /k͡pá.ɾá.dí.sè/

párádísè

1. paradise