Eternal means lasting for ever, with no beginning and no end. Eternal life, an eternal truth, the eternal city.
It belongs first to religion and philosophy, where eternal is stronger than everlasting: everlasting has a start and eternal does not. In ordinary speech it is an exaggeration for something that will not stop: her eternal complaining. Note the eternal triangle, meaning a love affair between three people; the eternal flame, kept burning at a memorial; and eternity, which in casual use means about twenty minutes.
1adjectiveeternalLasting for ever, without beginning or end.
“The question of eternal life is older than any of the answers.”
synonyms: everlasting, endless, perpetual
2adjectiveseemingSeeming never to stop.
“His eternal optimism survived four redundancies.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
eternal is a quality of lasting.
Latin aeternus is a contraction of aeviternus, from aevum, an age — the same root as age and ever. Eternal literally means age-lasting, and the sense of infinity was read into it by theology.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂ey-
Latin
aeternālis
Old French
eternal
Middle English
eternal
English, today
eternal
Built from
From Middle English eternal, from Old French eternal, from Latin aeternālis, from Latin aeternus (“eternal”), from aevum (“age”). Displaced native ēċe.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA