Definitions

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

  • noun Great pleasure; joy.
  • noun Something that gives great pleasure or enjoyment.
  • intransitive verb To take great pleasure or joy.
  • intransitive verb To give great pleasure or joy.
  • intransitive verb To please greatly: synonym: please.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To affect with great pleasure or rapture; please highly; give or afford a high degree of satisfaction or enjoyment to: as, a beautiful landscape delights the eye; harmony delights the ear; poetry delights the mind.
  • To have or take great pleasure; be greatly pleased or rejoiced: followed by an infinitive or by in.
  • noun A high degree of pleasure or satisfaction; joy; rapture.
  • noun That which gives great pleasure; that which affords a high degree of satisfaction or enjoyment.
  • noun Licentious pleasure; lust.

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

  • transitive verb To give delight to; to affect with great pleasure; to please highly
  • intransitive verb To have or take great delight or pleasure; to be greatly pleased or rejoiced; -- followed by an infinitive, or by in.
  • noun A high degree of gratification of mind; a high- wrought state of pleasurable feeling; lively pleasure; extreme satisfaction; joy.
  • noun That which gives great pleasure or delight.
  • noun obsolete Licentious pleasure; lust.

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

  • noun joy; pleasure
  • verb To give pleasure to.

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

  • verb hold spellbound
  • verb take delight in
  • noun something or someone that provides a source of happiness
  • noun a feeling of extreme pleasure or satisfaction
  • verb give pleasure to or be pleasing to

Etymologies

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

[Middle English delit, from Old French, a pleasure, from delitier, to please, charm, from Latin dēlectāre : dē-, intensive pref.; see de– + lactāre, frequentative of lacere, to entice.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

A wrong spelling, in imitation of words like light, might, etc.; the analogical modern spelling would be delite;, from Middle English deliten, from Old French deleiter, deliter, from Latin delectare ("to delight, please"), frequentative of delicere ("to allure"); see delicate.

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Examples

Comments

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  • "And I sat there, unable to take my eyes from the strip which persisted in remaining dark; I bent my whole body forward to make certain of noticing any change; but, gaze as I might, the the vertical black band, despite my impassioned longing, did not give me the intoxicating delight that I should have felt had I seen it changed by a stroke of sudden and significant magic to a luminous bar of gold."

    --Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 174 of the Modern Library paperback edition

    February 13, 2009