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predestined

adjectiveC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans spokenformal · an editor’s judgement

Predestined means fixed by fate long before it happened. The ending was decided before the story began.

The word starts in theology, where predestination is the doctrine that God has already settled who will be saved, and centuries of argument sit behind it. Ordinary English borrows it loosely and usually for effect: they seemed predestined to meet, a team predestined to lose. It nearly always takes to and a verb after it. The neighbouring words are worth separating — destined is gentler and often merely means headed for, while predestined insists that nothing could have gone otherwise.

Definitions of predestined

  1. 1adjectivepredestinedDetermined in advance by fate or by divine will.C1

    “He spoke as though the whole thing had been predestined.”

    synonyms: fated, preordained

Where it comes from

  1. Old French

    prédestiner

  2. English

    predestine

  3. English, today

    predestined

predestine comes from Old French prédestiner, from Medieval Latin - praedestinare. by surface analysis, pre- + destine. Displaced native foreteohhian.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 8 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

predestined in the wild

  • In Calvinism, some people are predestined and effectually called in due time (regenerated/born again) to faith by God while all others are reprobated.

    Predestination in Calvinism

  • FITS is predestined for this area of application due to its real-time display of navigation data.

    CASA FITS

  • Huntington was a strict Calvinist who believed some were predestined to be saved and some were not.

    William Huntington (preacher)

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.