Other forms: heavens
Heaven is the dwelling place of God and the blessed. Go to heaven, heaven and earth, thank heaven.
In Christianity it is where the saved go, and the picture of clouds and gates is largely from art rather than scripture. The plural, the heavens, means the sky: the heavens opened, meaning it rained hard. In everyday speech heaven means perfect pleasure — this is heaven — and heavenly means delicious. Note thank heavens, for heaven's sake, and move heaven and earth, meaning to try everything.
1nounheavenThe dwelling place of God and the blessed.
“She believes her grandmother is now in heaven.”
2nounstateA state of perfect pleasure.
“Four days of it was heaven and the fifth was not.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
heaven is a place or state of bliss.
Old English heofon meant both sky and the dwelling of God, and the two senses have never separated. Its earlier origin is genuinely uncertain, which is unusual for so old and common a word.
Proto-West Germanic
*hebun — heaven, sky
Old English
heofon
English, today
heaven
Built from
From a wide variety of Middle English - forms including hevene, heven, hevin and hewin (“heaven, sky”), from Old English heofon, heofone (“heaven, sky”), from Proto-West Germanic hebun (“heaven, sky”), of uncertain origin. Cognate with Scots heiven, hewin (“heaven, sky”), Middle Dutch heven (“sky, heaven”), Low German Heven (“heaven, sky”), and possibly the rare Icelandic - and Old Norse hifinn (“heaven, sky”), which are all probably dissimilated forms of the Germanic root which appears in Old Norse himinn (“heaven, sky”), Gothic 𐌷𐌹𐌼𐌹𐌽𐍃 (“heaven, sky”), gmq-osw himin, gmq-oda himæn and probably also (in another variant form) Old Saxon himil, Old Dutch himil (modern Dutch hemel) and Old High German himil (German Himmel). Accepting these as cognates, some scholars propose a further derivation from Proto-Germanic himinaz (“cover, cloud cover, firmament, sky, heaven”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA