chosen people


noun(often initial capital letters)
  1. the Israelites. Exodus 19.

Origin of chosen people

1
First recorded in 1525–35

Words Nearby chosen people

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2024

How to use chosen people in a sentence

  • The Jews are no more God's chosen people than the jay is his chosen bird, or the mosquito his chosen insect.

    Tyranny of God | Joseph Lewis
  • I shall make it my own, my chosen people, and give to them and to their children's children forever the land of Borneo.'

    The Argus Pheasant | John Charles Beecham
  • The precedent they found in "The chosen people," and established, as they thought, by God himself.

British Dictionary definitions for chosen people

chosen people

pl n
  1. any of various peoples believing themselves to be chosen by God, esp the Jews

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Cultural definitions for Chosen People

Chosen People

A term applied to the Jews (see also Jews). According to the Old Testament, God chose the descendants of Abraham through the line of Isaac and Jacob — the ancestors of today's Jews — as the people through whom he would reveal himself to the world. God therefore freed them from slavery in Egypt (see also Egypt) and led them into the Promised Land.

The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.