heaven
Americannoun
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heavens
plural
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the abode of God, the angels, and the spirits of the righteous after death; the place or state of existence of the blessed after the mortal life.
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(initial capital letter) Often Heavens the celestial powers; God.
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a metonym for God.
May heaven help us!
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(used with a singular verb) heavens, a wooden roof or canopy over the outer stage of an Elizabethan theater.
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Usually heavens. the sky, firmament, or expanse of space surrounding the earth.
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a place or state of supreme happiness.
She made his life a heaven on earth.
interjection
idioms
noun
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(sometimes capital) Christianity
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the abode of God and the angels
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a place or state of communion with God after death Compare hell
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(usually plural) the sky, firmament or space surrounding the earth
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(in any of various mythologies) a place, such as Elysium or Valhalla, to which those who have died in the gods' favour are brought to dwell in happiness
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a place or state of joy and happiness
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God or the gods, used in exclamatory phrases of surprise, exasperation, etc
for heaven's sake
heavens above
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ecstatically happy
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to do everything possible (to achieve something)
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of heaven
First recorded before 900; Middle English heven, Old English heofon; cognate with Middle Low German heven; akin to Old Norse himinn, Gothic himins, German Himmel
Explanation
Heaven is a place that seems absolutely perfect in every way. You can think of it as the lofty heavens up above, or as a place of everlasting bliss. The places you think of as heaven could also be called "paradise" or "Eden." All of these words are based on a religious idea of heaven as a perfect, blissful existence that's granted to good people after they die. This spiritual heaven is generally depicted as the place where God lives, and is commonly described as being high in the sky. In fact, the original meaning of the Old English heaven, heofon, was "sky."
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
“I would put a lot of money on OpenAI winning back the mandate of heaven a bit from Anthropic.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 1, 2026
Clouds billow and curl; chariots race upward, representing sutras that may deliver you to heaven.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 31, 2026
"I know heaven has the sweetest kindest girl. We will miss you terribly."
From BBC ● Jul. 22, 2026
On Tuesday, she wrote that Cody had died peacefully surrounded by family and “was welcomed into heaven as thunder bellowed outside, and we laughed because we knew it was a band of angels rejoicing.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 11, 2026
“I am afraid of nothing on heaven or Earth,” he said, and he slammed the door in the first mates face.
From "The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs" by Betty G. Birney
I’ve always tried to find a way between what came from the heavens, fate and what I can do myself.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 6, 2026
And former reality TV star Spencer Pratt relayed a message from the heavens.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 4, 2026
According to Rodgers, early astronomers "built a huge amount of data about the heavens which would subsequently be used for things that they had never thought about," he said.
From BBC ● May 18, 2026
The work suggests Dante recognized meteors as real geological forces at a time when Aristotelian beliefs still portrayed the heavens as perfect and unchanging.
From Science Daily ● May 11, 2026
Aristotle and Ptolemy had assumed that the heavens were mathematically legible, and indeed Ptolemy had devised techniques for reading them.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
