Home UK English other-worldly

Meaning of other-worldly in English:

other-worldly

Pronunciation

See synonyms for other-worldly

adjective

  • 1Relating to an imaginary or spiritual world.

    ‘music of an almost other-worldly beauty’
    • ‘Neptune, the planet of gentle love and compassion, is in a harmonious aspect to his Moon, which is a clear signal that his music is becoming more spiritual and other-worldly.’
    • ‘Some forms of contemporary theology have reacted strongly against this anti-body attitude and this other-worldly spirituality of modern Gnostics, whether within or outside the Church.’
    • ‘Some of our people, listening in on our ancestors' imagined, other-worldly discourse, hear only the endless repetition of the never again.’
    • ‘Is this evidence, at bottom, of an irresolvable clash between capitalistic materialism and religious, other-worldly values?’
    • ‘The practices of exclusive other-worldly salvation religions did not disappear with modernity, despite early Enlightenment imperatives, and have not disappeared so far despite recent globalization.’
    • ‘He's the other-worldly mystic, cloistered away, who deals daily in more murder, suffering and unforgiveness than most of us encounter in a month of Monday mornings.’
    • ‘There are metaphorical glimpses of heaven and hell - both as other-worldly places and as states of being within oneself.’
    • ‘Egypt's magical and mystical other-worldly presence captivates our curiosity with an appeal that crosses all boundaries of time, geography and culture.’
    • ‘You will, among other things, be an extremely tolerant person, even mystical, even other-worldly.’
    • ‘Now this wasn't the exotic and other-worldly form of déjà vu, but the ‘my brain has turned to mush and I keep on forgetting things' kind.’
    • ‘This is a film that's at once touching, funny and other-worldly, a surprising and refreshing bit of genre defiance that proves that distinctive movies can still be made, even in an age when some say everything has already been done.’
    • ‘While both manage to strike a balance between being suitably other-worldly and maintaining their audience's sympathy, their respective complaints at the harshness of the colonial yolks of their masters seem unfounded.’
    • ‘Importantly, the backdrop was the sublime other-worldly, essentially Gaelic landscape of the Western Isles, whose vastness he would later capture not only on canvas but in a series of extraordinary photographs.’
    • ‘The majority of people never bother to buy squash - they see it in the supermarket or farmers market, admire its other-worldly shapes, then head for the more familiar carrots, turnips and corn.’
    • ‘It's dark (many of these fish have a vampire-like hatred of anything over 25 watts), it feels very other-worldly, and it's filled with alien beings.’
    • ‘Which is odd because, up until now, she has rather resembled a llama herself, with her slightly shaggy hair, other-worldly expression and dainty, measured paces.’
    • ‘Suddenly his last couple of posts before his death become something other-worldly, and people stop to read his final words, probably hoping to find some truths: god, life, death.’
    • ‘These poems ‘have a different atmosphere and are more other-worldly, in a curious way.’’
    • ‘The songs on this new work combine the improvisational style of jazz, the strong melodic lines of calypso and the ethereal other-worldly trippiness of the East - often updated with new-age arrangements.’
    • ‘Metaphysical poetry, which rooted religious experience in the natural world, gave way to a religious poetry either more cerebral and coolly rational, or else more ethereal and other-worldly.’
    spiritual, religious, transcendental, transcendent, paranormal, other-worldly, supernatural, preternatural, non-rational, occult, metaphysical, ineffable
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  • 2Unworldly.

    ‘celibate clerics with a very other-worldly outlook’
    • ‘The outlook, the world view, was clearly other-worldly.’
    • ‘I'd been chatting with Michael and what struck me at the time was how shy and other-worldly he seemed.’
    • ‘What is so strange about Britain - so particular, so fearful, so other-worldly - that she should decide to withhold her unique wisdom from the [European] enterprise?’
    ethereal, fey, dreamy, spiritual, mystic, mystical
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