Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun All space-time, matter, and energy, including the solar system, all stars and galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space, regarded as a whole.
- noun A hypothetical whole of space-time, matter, and energy that is purported to exist simultaneously with but to be different from this universe.
- noun A model or conception of the earth and everything else that exists.
- noun The human race or a subset of it.
- noun A sphere of interest, activity, or understanding.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The totality of existing things; all that is in dynamical connection with general experience taken collectively—embracing the Creator and creation; or psychical and material objects, but excluding the Creator; or material objects only.
- noun The whole world; all mankind; all that meets us in experience, in a loose sense.
- noun In logic, the collection of all the objects to which any discourse refers: as, the universe of things.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun All created things viewed as constituting one system or whole; the whole body of things, or of phenomena; the to~ pa^n of the Greeks, the
mundus of the Latins; the world; creation.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The sum of everything that exists in the cosmos, including time and space itself; same as the
Universe . - noun An entity similar to our
Universe ; one component of a largerentity known as themultiverse . - noun Everything under consideration.
- noun An imaginary collection of worlds.
- noun Intense form of
world in the sense of perspective or social setting.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun everything that exists anywhere
- noun (statistics) the entire aggregation of items from which samples can be drawn
- noun everything stated or assumed in a given discussion
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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Thus if the spherical-surface beings are living on a planet of which the solar system occupies only a negligibly small part of the spherical universe, they have no means of determining whether they are living in a finite or in an infinite universe, because the piece of universe to which they have access is in both cases practically plane, or Euclidean.
Chapter 31. The Possibility of a “Finite” and Yet “Unbounded” Universe 1920
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Specifically the notion that what we call our universe is a 4-dimensional space-time that itself is just a surface in a higher dimensional space, called a brane, a 4-brane in this case.
Astronomers Find Black Holes Do Not Absorb Dark Matter | Universe Today 2010
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"The term universe in its complete physical sense applies to all matter in existence."
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The word universe literally means everything that exists.
George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt Lucy 2009
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The word universe literally means everything that exists.
George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt Lucy 2009
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The word universe literally means everything that exists.
George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt Lucy 2009
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The word universe literally means everything that exists.
George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt Lucy 2009
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Since the universe is virtually transparent to radiation of these wavelengths, nothing would really have happened to it: the radiation would expand in universe at the same rate as the universe is expanding.
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When we began to realize that there were other such vast aggregations of stars, we called them "island universes," but this was an obvious misnomer; since the word universe means everything there is, it can hardly have a plural.
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Now Hoyle may have been wrong about the steady state theory – the very term "big bang" as used to describe the beginning of the universe is his own dismissive phrase for what he regarded as a poor alternative theory – but he was no fool otherwise, and it was only his own argumentative and bloody-minded character, it is said, that prevented him from winning the Nobel prize.
The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle – review Nicholas Lezard 2010
reesetee commented on the word universe
"In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time."
--Edward P. Tryon
September 26, 2007
tbtabby commented on the word universe
Kent Hovind once claimed that this word means "single spoken sentence" as "proof" of a Biblical creation. I guess after mangling all known fields of science, he decided to tackle etymology.
January 4, 2009
seanahan commented on the word universe
There is this book about how English is really based on Biblical Hebrew starting in the garden of Eden, The Word: The Dictionary That Reveals The Hebrew Source of English (Paperback). It might interest some of us here. As far as I can tell without having read it, it is complete crap.
January 7, 2009
raavan commented on the word universe
universe is a mystery
February 9, 2010
Touring commented on the word universe
"My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."
-Stephen Hawking
December 6, 2010