different between luster vs glory

English

Alternative forms

• lustre (Commonwealth)

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /?l?st?/
• Rhymes: -?st?(?)

Etymology 1

From Middle French lustre, from Old Italian lustro, from Latin lustr? (“I brighten”), akin to lux (“light”).

Noun

luster (countable and uncountable, plural lusters) (American spelling)

1. Shine, polish or sparkle.

   He polished the brass doorknob to a high luster.

   • 1596, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book V, Canto 11, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006, p. 162,

     And over all the fields themselves did muster,

     With bils and glayves making a dreadfull luster;

     That forst at first those knights backe to retyre:

     As when the wrathfull Boreas doth bluster,

     Nought may abide the tempest of his yre,

     Both man and beast doe fly, and succour doe inquyre.

   • 1605/6, William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act III, Scene VII,

     First Servant: O, I am slain! My lord, you have one eye left

     To see some mischief on him. O! [Dies.

     Cornwall: Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly!

     Where is thy lustre now?

     Gloucester: All dark and comfortless.

   • 1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV, 846-850,

     […] abashed the devil stood,

     And felt how awful goodness is, and saw

     Virtue in her shape how lovely, saw, and pined

     His loss; but chiefly to find here observed

     His lustre visibly impaired; yet seemed

     Undaunted. […]

   • 1693, Joseph Addison, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book III, The Story of Cadmus, [1]

     The scorching sun was mounted high, / In all its lustre, to the noonday sky.

   • 1810, William Blake, Milton: A Poem in Two Books, Book I, 1-5

     Daughters of Beulah! Muses who inspire the Poet’s Song!

     Record the journey of immortal Milton through your realms

     Of terror & mild moony lustre, in soft sexual delusions

     Of varied beauty, to delight the wanderer and repose

     His burning thirst & freezing hunger! […]

   • 1914, James Joyce, "The Dead" in Dubliners, Penguin, 1996, p. 178

     Gabriel coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake and, without looking at her, kicked off his goloshes and flicked actively with his muffler at his patent-leather shoes. […] When he had flicked lustre into his shoes he stood up and pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body.

   • 1922, E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros, Chapter VIII, [2]

     The canopy above the bed was a mosaic of tiny stones, jet, serpentine, dark hyacinth, black marble, bloodstone, and lapis lazuli, so confounded in a maze of altering hue and lustre that they might mock the palpitating sky of night.

   • 2001, James Wood, Introduction to Saul Bellow, Collected Stories, New York: Viking, p. xvii,

     Curiously enough, the stream of consciousness, for all its reputation as the great accelerator of description, actually slows down realism, asks it to dawdle over tiny remembrances, tiny details and lusters, to circle and return.

2. By extension, brilliance, attractiveness or splendor.

   After so many years in the same field, the job had lost its luster.

   • 1895, The Gentleman's Magazine, Volume 279, p. 602, [3]

     […] whose ancestors, says Clarendon, had been transported out of Normandy with the Conqueror, "and had continued," says Sir Henry Wotton, "about the space of four hundred years, rather without obscurity than with any great lustre […] ".

   • 1970, S.Y. Agnon, "Agunot" in Twenty-One Stories, New York: Schocken Books, p. 30,

     Their days of rest are wrested from them, their feasts are fasts, their lot is dust instead of luster.

   • 2006, Florence Tamagne, A History of Homosexuality in Europe, Volume I & II: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919-1939, New York: Algora, p. 87,

     The notion of two homosexuals living together more or less openly did not sit well with their neighbors, or even their friends, but Millthorpe took on a kind of symbolic luster as a kind of homosexual paradise.

3. Refinement, polish or quality.

   He spoke with all the lustre a seasoned enthusiast should have.

   • 1836, Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Poetry: A Metrical Essay," in The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes in Two Volumes: Volume I, Boston & New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1892, p. 37 [4]

     Thus err the many, who, entranced to find

     Unwonted lustre in some clearer mind,

     Believe that Genius sets the laws at naught

     Which chain the pinions of our wildest thought;

   • 1971, Cynthia Ozick, "The Butterfly and the Traffic Light" in Collected Stories, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006, p. 288,

     But Main, High, and Central have no past; rather, their past is now. It is not the fault of the inhabitants that nothing has gone before them. Nor are they to be condemned if they make their spinal streets conspicuous, and confer egregious lustre and false acclaim on Central, High, or Main, and erect minarets and marquees indeed as though their city were already in dream and fable.

4. A candlestick, chandelier, girandole, etc. generally of an ornamental character.
   • 1735, Alexander Pope, "The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated," 45-48

     Each mortal has his pleasure: none deny

     Scarsdale his bottle, Darty his ham-pie;

     Ridotta sips and dances, till she see

     The doubling lustres dance as fast as she;

   • 1905, Thomas Mann, "The Blood of the Walsungs", translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter, in Death in Venice & Seven Other Stories, New York: Vintage, 1954 p. 294,

     The immense room was carpeted, the walls were covered with eighteenth-century panelling, and three electric lustres hung from the ceiling.

5. A substance that imparts lustre to a surface, such as plumbago or a glaze.
   • 2009, Yuka Kadoi, Islamic Chinoiserie: The Art of Mongol Iran, Edinburgh University Press, p. 52,

     Chinese themes are equally recognisable in the star-shaped and hexagonal tiles with either moulded relief or lustre-painted decoration, sometimes surrounded by an inscription border […]

6. Lusterware.
   • 1936, Freya Stark, The Southern Gates of Arabia: A Journey in the Hadhramaut, Boston: E.P. Dutton, Chapter XXIII, p. 253,

     The whole place was covered with fragments of pottery, mostly very rough, and difficult to identify as to date. Two small lustre shards belong to the ninth or tenth century and a green glaze resembles the output of the kilns found by Sir Aurel Stein on the coast of Makran.

7. A fabric of wool and cotton with a lustrous surface, used for women's dresses.
   • 1938, Xavier Herbert, Capricornia, New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1943, Chapter IX, p. 143, [5]

     Mrs. McLash was dressed for travelling. She wore a black lustre skirt that just exposed her broken button-boots […]

Antonyms

• (brilliance): dullness

Derived terms

• lackluster
• lusterware

Related terms

• lustrous
• lustrum

Translations

Verb

luster (third-person singular simple present lusters, present participle lustering, simple past and past participle lustered) (American spelling)

1. (intransitive) To gleam, have luster.
2. (transitive) To give luster, distinguish.
3. (transitive) To give a coating or other treatment to impart physical luster.
   • 1985, Nadine Gordimer, "Sins of the Third Age" in Something Out There, Penguin, p. 69,

     Peter and Mania found a pensione whose view was of chestnut woods and a horizon looped by peaks lustred with last winter's snow, distant in time as well as space.

Translations

Etymology 2

From Latin lustrum, from lustrare, cognate with the above

Noun

luster (plural lusters)

1. A lustrum, quinquennium, a period of five years, originally the interval between Roman censuses.

Related terms

• lustral

Translations

Etymology 3

lust +? -er.

Noun

luster (plural lusters)

1. One who lusts.
   • 1867-1872, Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Testimonies against the Jews

     Neither fornicators, nor those who serve idols, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor the lusters after mankind […] shall obtain the kingdom of God.

Anagrams

• Ulster, lurest, lustre, luters, result, rulest, rustle, sutler, truels, ulster

Dutch

Etymology

From French lustre, see luister.

Pronunciation

• Hyphenation: lus?ter
• Rhymes: -?st?r

Noun

luster m (plural lusters, diminutive lustertje n)

1. A chandelier, an ostentatious ceiling light
2. Alternative form of luister

Polish

Noun

luster

1. genitive plural of lustro

Serbo-Croatian

Etymology

From German Luster.

Noun

lùster m (Cyrillic spelling ???????)

1. chandelier

Declension

English

Etymology

From Middle English glory, glorie, from Old French glorie (“glory”), from Latin gl?ria (“glory, fame, renown, praise, ambition, boasting”). Doublet of gloria.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /??l???i/
• (without the horse–hoarse merger) IPA^(key): /??lo(?)?i/
• Rhymes: -??ri

Noun

glory (countable and uncountable, plural glories)

1. Great beauty and splendor.
2. Honour, admiration, or distinction, accorded by common consent to a person or thing; high reputation; renown.
   • 1596, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, London: William Ponsonbie, Book 2, Canto 1, p. 197,^[1]

     In this faire wize they traueild long yfere,

     Through many hard assayes, which did betide;

     Of which he honour still away did beare,

     And spred his glorie through all countries wide.

3. That quality in a person or thing which secures general praise or honour.
   • 1590, Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, London: William Ponsonbie, Book 1, “The First Eclogues,” [p. 92b],^[2]

     Deeme it no gloire [sic] to swell in tyrannie.

   • c. 1608, William Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Act II, Scene 2,^[3]

     As jewels lose their glory if neglected,

     So princes their renowns if not respected.
4. Worship or praise.
5. (meteorology, optics) An optical phenomenon, consisting of concentric rings and somewhat similar to a rainbow, caused by sunlight or moonlight interacting with the water droplets that compose mist or clouds, centered on the antisolar or antilunar point.

   Synonym: anticorona

6. Victory; success.
7. An emanation of light supposed to shine from beings that are specially holy. It is represented in art by rays of gold, or the like, proceeding from the head or body, or by a disk, or a mere line.
   • 1854, Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Chapter 13,^[5]

     Seen across the dim candle with his moistened eyes, she looked as if she had a glory shining round her head.

8. (theology) The manifestation of the presence of God as perceived by humans in Abrahamic religions.
9. (obsolete) Pride; boastfulness; arrogance.
   • c. 1624, George Chapman (translator), The Crowne of all Homers Workes Batrachomyomachia or the Battaile of Frogs and Mise, His Hymn’s and Epigrams, London: John Bill, “A Hymne to Venus,” p. 106,^[6]

     […] But if thou declare

     The Secrets, truth; and art so mad to dare

     (In glory of thy fortunes) to approue,

     That rich-crownd Venus, mixt with thee in loue;

     Ioue (fir’d with my aspersion, so dispred)

     Will, with a wreakefull lightning, dart thee dead.

Synonyms

• (emanation of light proceeding from specially holy beings): halo
• praise
• worship
• fame
• honor
• honour

Related terms

Translations

Verb

glory (third-person singular simple present glories, present participle glorying, simple past and past participle gloried)

1. To exult with joy; to rejoice.
   • 1753, James Hervey, "A Visitation Sermon: Preached at Northampton, May 10, 1753":

     In what the Apostle did glory?—He gloried in a Cross. ... [T]o the Ear of a Galatian, it conveyed much the same Meaning, as if the Apostle had gloried in a Halter; gloried in the Gallows; gloried in a Gibbet.

   • 1891: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles

     He says he glories in what happened, and that good may be done indirectly; but I wish he would not so wear himself out now he is getting old, and would leave such pigs to their wallowing.

   • 1902, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures 4 & 5:

     When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in, provided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its victory.

2. To boast; to be proud.
   • 1881, Revised Version, 2 Corinthians 7:14:

     For if in anything I have gloried to him on your behalf, I was not put to shame; but as we spake all things to you in truth, so our glorying also, which I made before Titus, was found to be truth.

3. (archaic, poetic) To shine radiantly.
   • 1859–85, Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King, "The Last Tournament":

     Down in a casement sat,

     A low sea-sunset glorying round her hair

     And glossy-throated grace, Isolt the Queen.

Translations

Middle English

Noun

glory

1. Alternative form of glorie