Pronounced: vouch-SAFE, verb
Notes: This word doesn’t mean what I thought it meant
Yesterday’s word
The word empyreal means
- of or relating to the firmament; celestial
- sublime
First usage
Our word came into English in the late 1400s
Background / Comments
When our word first came into English, it referred to things related to the “empyrean” – the highest heaven or outermost heavenly sphere of ancient and medieval cosmology (it was thought to contain or be composed of fire). In the words of Dante (Divine Comedy) and Milton (Paradise Lost), it was used to refer to their idea of the Christian paradise. These days, it is used in the broader sense of “celestial” or “sublime”. Our word came from the Late Latin word empyreus, a variant of empýrius, which came from the Greek word empyrios (fiery), which is made up of em- (in; within; inside) and pŷr (fire) and -ios (an adjectival suffix).
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 