Other forms: glories
Glory is great honour and fame won by great deeds. Win glory, a moment of glory, the glory days.
It is a grand word and belongs to sport, war, religion and history rather than to ordinary life. In religion, glory is the splendour of God, which is the oldest English use. The everyday phrases are worth having: in your glory means at your happiest and most in your element, glory days means a past time of success, and blaze of glory means a dramatic ending. The verb glory in something means to take open delight in it.
1noungloryGreat honour and fame won by achievement.
“There is no glory in winning a game like that.”
synonyms: honour, renown, distinction
2nounbeautyGreat beauty or splendour.
“The garden in June is in its full glory.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
glory is a state of honour.
Latin gloria meant fame, renown and also boasting — the Romans kept those together in one word. English took the honour and left the boasting, though it survives faintly in glory in and in the adjective glorious used ironically.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵneh₃-
Latin
glōria — glory, fame, renown, praise, ambition, boasting
Old French
glorie — glory
Middle English
glory
English, today
glory
From Middle English glory, glorie, from Old French glorie (“glory”), from Latin glōria (“glory, fame, renown, praise, ambition, boasting”). a doublet of gloria. Displaced native wuldor.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA