Other forms: sublimes
Sublime means so beautiful or great that it feels beyond this world. A sublime view, sublime music, from the sublime to the ridiculous.
In eighteenth-century aesthetics the sublime was a technical term, set against the beautiful: beauty pleases and the sublime overwhelms, which is why mountains, storms and vast spaces were its examples. That distinction still runs under ordinary use. In chemistry, to sublime is to pass from solid to gas without melting, as dry ice does. Note sublimation; and from the sublime to the ridiculous, meaning a sharp fall.
1adjectivesublimeSo beautiful or great that it feels beyond this world.
“The singer's performance was sublime, and the whole theatre fell silent.”
synonyms: transcendent, exalted
2verbpassTo pass from solid to gas without melting.
“Dry ice sublimes at roughly minus seventy-eight degrees.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
sublime is a quality of overwhelming greatness.
Sublime is raised up. Latin sublīmis meant elevated or lifted high, whether of a thing, a person's rank or a feeling, and English kept the height and turned it into a compliment.
Proto-Indo-European
*Heh₃l-
English, today
sublime
Partly from the following:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA