Main definitions of divine in English

: divine¹ divine²

divine¹

adjectivediviner, divinest

1Of or like God or a god.
‘heroes with divine powers’
‘paintings of shipwrecks being prevented by divine intervention’
- ‘Evidently this was the limit imposed by divine providence upon that sort of folly.’
- ‘I wandered about in my swimming costume for a bit hoping for divine intervention.’
- ‘York City's push for back to back wins was unhinged by divine intervention.’
- ‘We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy nor philosophical opinions into religion.’
- ‘Vera tells Lombard that she thinks this whole situation could be a kind of divine retribution.’
- ‘Revelation is intuitive knowledge and wisdom about some aspect of nature through divine inspiration.’
- ‘Sunlight, for instance, often stands in for divine grace or revelation.’
- ‘To the contrary, the expression of our intentions is itself dependent on divine grace.’
- ‘Yet he recognized that even negative attribution gives some understanding of the divine being.’
- ‘Only Jesus Christ, both fully divine and fully human, can accomplish this for all of humankind.’
- ‘To err is human, to forgive divine.’
- ‘Yet he was driven by a conviction in sacred, divine principles.’
- ‘If we are a cult member, it may be a symbol of our sacred relations to the divine principle operating in the universe.’
- ‘They told me that during their abduction there was a meeting with a divine or sacred being.’
- ‘A habitual contemplation of his divine form, dispelling impediments, blesses a devotee with the kinds of successes.’
- ‘Through these rituals they also experience their female bodies as sacred, themselves as divine.’
- ‘This divine origin made fire a sacred element, and the Greeks maintained fires in front of their temples.’
- ‘A prince could scarcely claim divine sanction for his authority and then exercise it in ways that blatantly contradicted its ultimate source and model.’
- ‘It's an almost religious process of divine selection - the elect and the damned.’
- ‘This divine origin is particular to the sacred, mystical, and theological insight of the people of Ngaa Rauru Kiitahi.’
godly, godlike, angelic, seraphic, saintly, beatific
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1. 1.1Devoted to God; sacred.
  ‘divine liturgy’
  ‘Any authority will do, any divine mission, any sacred fatherland or revolution.’
  ‘Doni insists, nonetheless, that Michelangelo's voluptuous simulations of sacred bodies are potentially divine in origin.’
  ‘Strokes of the script gain a rhythmic and ritualistic hue as Raju creates divine and sacred forms with them.’
  ‘On the walls and ceiling, his pen and ink drawings depicted only the divine, the sacred, the holy, and the damned.’
  ‘He said that all the religions and great divine personalities always exhorted people to promote peace, love and tolerance.’
  ‘While religion offered a divine glimmer of human purpose, humanists made that purpose our own.’
  ‘Dance is a sacred movement of the various limbs with deep divine feeling.’
  ‘Professor Copley pointed out that the secularisation process of RE has taken the divine out of religion since the 1960s and 1970s.’
  ‘Its leader, Ayah Pin, claims to be divine and the ‘boss of all religions’, according to a recent newspaper interview.’
  ‘All persons are sacred, because they partake of the divine, as no animal does.’
  ‘But Scripture is not the only source of divine revelation to the attentive ear.’
  ‘Thus, through a process must like Transubstantiation, it'll become simply divine.’
  ‘While the Grand Canyon and Zion have an almost divine grandeur, Bryce feels more mercurial.’
  ‘A book of exemplary wisdom was, therefore, easily more divine than idols.’
  ‘How could a human being create something so perfect, so divine?’
  ‘A septuagenarian performed the Ganesha dance with all its divine appeal.’
  religious, holy, sacred, sanctified, consecrated, blessed, devotional, devoted to God, dedicated to God
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2informal Very pleasing; delightful.
‘he had the most divine smile’
- ‘In the wings, the divine Edwina smiled on serenely.’
- ‘They weren't laws that came from some fair or divine place.’
- ‘Evidently, his divine brilliance is too great for mere mortals.’
- ‘For what I had in mind the weather was perfectly divine.’
- ‘However, Miss Blanchett as Miss Hepburn was amazingly and stunningly divine.’
- ‘The flavour of this most wonderful of vegetables is divine, whether steamed, boiled or roasted.’
- ‘If things work out, you will have a perfectly divine singularity to serve up to family and guests.’
- ‘From gangly arm to fleshy middle, it's me: lovely, divine, and supremely perfect.’
- ‘The girl was sitting on a rock in the middle of a divine forest, smiling angelically.’
- ‘His beautiful date Eanna looked divine in a full-length, figure-hugging turquoise gown, which she bought in Monsoon.’
- ‘Only Nightcrawler is utterly divine, well-tuned and perfectly turned.’
- ‘They fluttered down, the petals cascading around the guests and the royal family, causing a gorgeous and divine sight.’
- ‘On one visit, I found trail mix bars that were absolutely divine.’
- ‘The Cajun butter sauce on my shrimp and scallops was absolutely divine.’
- ‘Anyway Mr. Hamilton is here and Jenny don't you think he is simply divine?’
- ‘The salmon, served with the usual cream sauce, was described as simply divine.’
- ‘She smiled daintily at him and realized what a truly divine time she was having.’
- ‘To watch him as an artist was a truly divine experience.’
- ‘I'll have to say that beer is a bit expensive, but cocktails were divine and worth every penny.’
- ‘Cocktails were divine and the suggestions spot on.’
lovely, handsome, beautiful, good-looking, prepossessing, charming, delightful, appealing, engaging, winsome, ravishing, gorgeous, bewitching, beguiling
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noun

1dated A cleric or theologian.
- ‘There are also many references to contemporary natural sciences and a healthy smattering of Anglican divines, including Hooker, Andrewes, and Herbert.’
- ‘Bishops, in classical Anglicanism, have often been divines themselves-thoughtful scholars as well as administrative functionaries.’
- ‘Even the 5 percent of the nation who made up the Catholic recusants succumbed to an intellectual onslaught led by Anglican divines.’
- ‘Spinks refers briefly to and quotes the work of forty-four English and twenty Scottish divines of the period after 1603.’
- ‘The stereotypical view of Calvinist divines has them all nodding their heads in a ringing ‘yes, indeed.’’
theologian, clergyman, member of the clergy, churchman, churchwoman, cleric, ecclesiastic, man of the cloth, man of God, holy man, holy woman, preacher, priest
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2the DivineProvidence or God.
- ‘After all, the Divine is an all-encompassing entity.’
- ‘This is how we are made in the image of the Divine.’
- ‘After all, the Divine made you the way that They wanted.’
- ‘Would you associate him with Prometheus or Metatron, is he on the side of Man or the Divine?’
- ‘The mythology of a religion tends to reflect the covenant between the followers of a religion and the Divine.’

Origin

Late Middle English via Old French from Latin divinus, from divus ‘godlike’ (related to deus ‘god’).

Pronunciation

divine

/dɪˈvʌɪn/

Main definitions of divine in English

: divine¹ divine²

divine²

verb

[with object]

1Discover (something) by guesswork or intuition.
‘mum had divined my state of mind’
with clause ‘they had divined that he was a fake’
- ‘The reader is not supposed to have to divine the meaning that lies behind the ramblings and jottings of the writer.’
- ‘Chen, the temple's caretaker, spent months divining what images, scenes and poems should canopy worshippers.’
- ‘I hadn't correctly divined your attitude towards your tenants.’
- ‘But, as Maurice Newman correctly divined, if you don't like the situation, don't stay around.’
- ‘I tried to divine an intention from her message.’
- ‘When we divine the future we do so in the hope that we can profit from the knowledge.’
- ‘She has had remarkable success in divining those names.’
- ‘Let's try to start divining some answers this week by taking a look at the potential contenders for this season's Larry O'Brien trophy.’
- ‘The path all of this takes is easily divined, although the ending is not.’
- ‘And I wasn't able to divine what that magic ingredient was exactly.’
- ‘They are points of god-contact, sites and occasions for divining in a much broader sense.’
- ‘The job basically was to follow the daily open market operations of the Fed and try to divine whether policy had changed.’
- ‘But he does have a sure touch for divining politicians' larger strategic patterns.’
- ‘For a while they simply stared at each other, as if sizing up the opposition, divining out points of weakness.’
- ‘Two shrewd commentators of the late 1940s had already divined that at least some Rorschach wizards achieved their success by resorting to tricks.’
- ‘At the start of each project, he strives to divine the ‘voice of the site.’’
- ‘When the BBC lost transmission midway through the second half, it was hard to divine whether this was a technical fault or quality control.’
- ‘Sometimes we discover we have ‘made’ an interpretation without realising it, on other occasions we struggle to articulate what it is we have divined.’
- ‘The paradox is that on the only point of principle which I think one can divine from my judgment, you were successful.’
- ‘In the other, a Latino man had written to Grant to tell him that about his brother's problems, which Grant proceeded to divine at the meeting.’
guess, surmise, conjecture, suspect, suppose, assume, presume, deduce, infer, work out, theorize, hypothesize
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2Have supernatural or magical insight into (future events)
‘frauds who claimed to divine the future in chickens' entrails’
- ‘Once this meaning or purpose has been divined, then the past, present, and future can be seen as conforming to some kind of structure or shape.’
- ‘Do Warren and Pearson suggest that lenders are clairvoyants who can divine what direction prices will take in future years?’
- ‘And from this alleged mutter, trained exegetes in the press are now divining the entire political infrastructure of the Vatican.’
- ‘They called them sorceresses or ‘people who divined by the spirit.’’
- ‘Though I am not proposing the actual use of Tarot cards as a means of divining past or future events, what, exactly, would the limits be for non-natural explanations?’
- ‘One form of magic that many of us do quite often is divining.’
- ‘In addition, experts with specialized knowledge may perform specific tasks related to healing, building, or divining.’
- ‘Seeing the king, Samudra divined that the time had come for Ashoka's conversion.’
- ‘This ‘rationalisation’ of divining pointed to the dialectical nature of the ideological contest between folk and scientific wisdom.’
- ‘It's sad that 450 years later we still have to go over similar arguments with those who believe that divining works.’
- ‘The elimination of these Christians, the augur would claim, could restore his divining powers and help the emperor.’
- ‘Black cats were considered to be reincarnated beings with the ability to divine the future.’
- ‘We must be given time and space away from the hordes to divine the future.’
- ‘In ancient Rome, emperors would divine truth by reading the entrails of animals or vanquished foes.’
- ‘The profiler is about the equivalent of somebody who divines jackal tracks with a broken twig.’
- ‘When not divining the crowd's thoughts, he dives into the city's psyche, through anthropomorphizing metaphors.’
foretell, predict, prophesy, forecast, foresee, prognosticate
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1. 2.1Discover (water) by dowsing.
  ‘he showed him how to divine water’
  ‘Dowsing and divining water is the subject of the club's talk today.’
  ‘Talking of which, I discovered a talent yesterday I didn't know I had… water divining!’
  ‘The only way to get a really good signal is to wander around with the antenna stretched out, as if you're divining for water.’
  ‘The example of water divining in southern Africa, however, suggests that the irrational was as much a feature of western as indigenous knowledge systems.’
  ‘The affront of water divining to the latter's modernist pretensions led to foreign experts being pressed into the fray, but to no avail.’
  ‘Thus, after more than a decade of denouncing water divining, the state belatedly sought to harness it to hydraulic development.’
  ‘He says, ‘Water divining involves the static electrical and magnetic powers of the body.’’
  ‘It is no relation at all to native hazel, but like hazel the settlers found its forked branches ideal for water divining.’
  ‘Some rabbit babies get dirty in a mud puddle but the day is saved when Tag finds a cleansing spring of water by divining with a hazel twig.’
  ‘They've been divining water, fruit, music and happiness together ever since.’
  ‘How frogs locate water remains unknown, they seem to have a special water divining sense.’
  ‘Afterwards explore the grounds to find underground water and other aspects of divining.’
  ‘Like a divining stick, the football seemingly found the water at every opportunity.’
  ‘Of course, a simple double-blind test can be applied to any claims of divining or dowsing powers.’
  ‘Others test him by bringing in unlikely objects for him to divine at the show's finale.’
  dowse, find by dowsing
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