Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Of or relating to a numen; supernatural.
- adjective Filled with or characterized by a sense of a supernatural presence.
- adjective Spiritually elevated; sublime.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Evincing the presence of a deity.
- adjective same as
supernatural .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Related to a
numen ; indicating the presence of adivinity - adjective
Awe-inspiring ; evoking a sense of thetranscendent ,mystical orsublime .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective of or relating to or characteristic of a numen
- adjective evincing the presence of a deity
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The term numinous is often said to have been coined by the German Lutheran scholar Rudolf
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The term numinous is also used by C.G. Jung to depict a spiritual experience involving some kind of alteration of ego-based consciousness (i.e. "altered states").
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Just as many of the people who believe in numinous coincidence and supernatural intervention are secretly hoping to prove that it is they themselves who are the pet of the universe, so many of those who overcompensate for inferiority are possessed of titanic egos and regard other people as necessary but incidental.
The Zealot 2009
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Just as many of the people who believe in numinous coincidence and supernatural intervention are secretly hoping to prove that it is they themselves who are the pet of the universe, so many of those who overcompensate for inferiority are possessed of titanic egos and regard other people as necessary but incidental.
The Zealot 2009
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I think that our experience of the numinous is both undeniable and entirely biological: the state of spiritual peace is the result of tickling some evolved center of our brain, a bit of neurology that conferred a survival advantage on our ancestors whose numinous hallucinations of a higher order in the universe drove them to catch more antelopes, eat better, and have more babies.
Boing Boing 2007
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You can read the book fairly quickly, but there are things you'll want to come back to -- some of the musings about destiny, and the place of what some call the numinous or the fates, some call the workings of God, in the way things turn out.
Dewey's Treehouse 2009
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“numinous” from the Latin word numen, which denoted a supernatural nonpersonalized being.
ORIGINS OF RELIGION S. G. F. BRANDON 1968
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I think that this kind of passion is also connected, and that, in touching it we are connected to something numinous, which is actually a long way to go from a venture capital-baiting blog post, but there you are.
manifesting the manifesto, part the first « raincoaster 2007
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The numinous is a reliably elusive theme for a writer, and Burnside hunts it down like an indefatigable lepidopterist.
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph 2011
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But people too have long felt the beauty of trees; what the theologian Bruno Otto called their "numinous" quality.
Why woodlands are wonderful Colin Tudge 2010
vanishedone commented on the word numinous
http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/archive/2002/08/23.html cites four examples for this word, and not one of them is by Rudolf Otto, perhaps because he originally wrote in German. His mysterium tremendum is pretty firmly associated with the numinous, though.
October 24, 2007
chained_bear commented on the word numinous
"'Perhaps they are assembled in the grove for some religious ceremony,' said Martin. 'Nothing more numinous than a grove, as the ancient Hebrews knew.'"
--Patrick O'Brian, The Nutmeg of Consolation, 241
March 9, 2008
she commented on the word numinous
It took a second to realize this word was not numnums.
July 12, 2008
bilby commented on the word numinous
Damn :-(
July 12, 2008
chained_bear commented on the word numinous
I like numnums.
July 13, 2008
reesetee commented on the word numinous
Yum.
July 21, 2008
milosrdenstvi commented on the word numinous
A tremendously useful word. I learned it from C. S. Lewis.
June 5, 2009
shanvrolijk commented on the word numinous
" In the light of such new frameworks that are no more dependent on recourse to a numinous entity in order to sustain worldviews and moral imperatives, Iqbāl was left with little choice to critically engage with its foundations, as long as he wanted to sustain his conviction in the absolute inevitability of a religious grounding of all human pursuit."
Source: “I Pine for True Closeness”: Muḥammad Iqbāl’s Uneasy Relationship with Christianity, and the Islamic Social Ideal
January 22, 2018