Other forms: marvels, marveled
A marvel is something that stops you and makes you stare. A suspension bridge carrying eight lanes of traffic on wires no thicker than your arm, or a two-year-old who can already name forty dinosaurs.
Marvel is a verb too, and it takes AT: you marvel at the view, at her patience, at how fast children grow. You can also marvel that something is so. For the noun, a marvel OF is the standard shape, as in a marvel of engineering or a marvel of modern medicine. The adjective marvellous (marvelous in America) has drifted down from full wonder to ordinary praise, so a marvellous dinner is just a good dinner. For most people under thirty the word calls up Marvel the comics company first, which was named for exactly this sense; the plain English word got there about six hundred years earlier.
1nounmarvelSomething that fills you with wonder.
“The old clock is a marvel of patience and tiny brass parts.”
synonyms: wonder, phenomenon
2verbfilledTo be filled with wonder at something.
“Visitors still marvel at how the roof stays up with no pillars under it.”
marvel is something that causes wonder.
Old French merveille meant a wonder, and behind it stands Latin mīrābilia, wonderful things, the plural of mīrābilis, strange or wonderful. That in turn comes from mīror, to wonder at, and mīrus, wonderful. The same root runs through miracle and mirror. English has had marvel since about 1300.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)mey-
Latin
mīrābilia — wonderful things
Vulgar Latin
*miribilia
Old French
merveille — a wonder
Middle English
merveile
English, today
marvel
Built from
First attested from 1300, from Middle English merveile, from Old French merveille (“a wonder”), from Vulgar Latin miribilia, from Latin mīrābilia (“wonderful things”), from neuter plural of mīrābilis (“strange, wonderful”), from mīror (“to wonder at”), from mīrus (“wonderful”). a doublet of mirabilia.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA