goddess

UK/ˈɡɒdɛs/US/ˈɡɑdəs/

nounB1+Common in everyday speech and writing · #2,676 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: goddesses

A goddess is a female being worshipped as divine. A goddess of war, the goddess Athena, worship the goddess.

The figurative use, meaning a woman of great beauty, has been in English since the sixteenth century. The word is god plus the feminine ending, and it is one of the few such pairs still in ordinary use.

Definitions of goddess

1noungoddessA female being worshipped as divine.B1+
“Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom.”

goddess is a deity.

Where it comes from

God plus -ess, formed in Middle English around 1350.

Middle English
goddesse
English, today
goddess

From Middle English goddesse, equivalent to god + -ess, formed about 1350. The figurative meaning is first found in Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes calender (1579). Displaced Old English gyden.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

goddess in the wild

A major goddess in the Greek pantheon, Aphrodite featured prominently in ancient Greek literature.
Aphrodite
Sappho's Ode to Aphrodite is one of the earliest poems dedicated to the goddess and survives from the Archaic period nearly complete.
Aphrodite
From her origin as an Aegean palace goddess, Athena was closely associated with the city of Athens.
Athena
Although Demeter is mostly known as a grain goddess, she also appeared as a goddess of health, birth, and marriage, and had connections to the Underworld.
Demeter
Many major goddesses are also associated with magic, war, strategy, hunting, farming, wisdom, fate, earth, sky, power, laws, justice, and more.
Goddess

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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