different between purgatory vs paradise

English

Etymology

From Latin purg?t?rium (“cleansing”). Cognate to English purge.

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /?p????t??i/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /?p????t?i/
• US: pur?ga?to?ry
• UK: pur?ga?tory

Noun

purgatory (countable and uncountable, plural purgatories)

1. (Christianity) Alternative letter-case form of Purgatory
2. Any situation where suffering is endured, particularly as part of a process of redemption.
   • 1605, Nicholas Breton, An Olde Mans Lesson, and a Young Mans Loue, London: Edward White,^[1]

     […] many Gods breedeth heathens miseries, many countries trauailers humors, many wiues mens purgatories, and many friends trustes ruine:

   • 1774, John Burgoyne, The Maid of the Oaks, London: T. Becket, Act I, Scene 1, p. 6,^[2]

     I laid my rank and fortune at the fair one’s feet, and would have married instantly; but that Oldworth opposed my precipitancy, and insisted upon a probation of six months absence—It has been a purgatory!

   • 1853, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth, Chapter 25,^[3]

     It might be […] that Ruth had worked her way through the deep purgatory of repentance up to something like purity again; God only knew!

   • 1904, Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, Chapter 10,^[4]

     Later came midsummer, with the stifling heat, when the dingy killing beds of Durham’s became a very purgatory; one time, in a single day, three men fell dead from sunstroke.

   • 1997, J. M. Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Penguin, Chapter 11, p. 100,^[5]

     […] that would mean he would be irrecoverably Afrikaans and would have to spend years in the purgatory of an Afrikaans boarding-school, as all farm-children do, before he would be allowed to come back to the farm.

Related terms

Translations

Adjective

purgatory (comparative more purgatory, superlative most purgatory)

1. Tending to cleanse; expiatory.
   • 1600, Philemon Holland (translator), The Roman Historie Written by T. Livius of Padua, London, Book 41, p. 1103,^[6]

     Last of all, the prodigie of Siracusa was expiat by a purgatory sacrifice, by direction from the soothsaiers to what gods, supplications and sacrifice should be made.

   • 1790, Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, London: J. Dodsley, p. 272,^[7]

     This purgatory interval is not unfavourable to a faithless representative, who may be as good a canvasser as he was a bad governor.

See also

• heaven
• hell
• limbo
• gehenna

English

Alternative forms

• paradize (obsolete)

Etymology

From Middle English paradis, paradise, paradys, from Late Old English parad?s, borrowed from Old French paradis, from Latin parad?sus, from Ancient Greek ?????????? (parádeisos), ultimately from Proto-Iranian *paridayjah. Doublet of parvis. Replaced Old English neorxnawang.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation, NYC) enPR: p?r??d?s, IPA^(key): /?pæ?.?.da?s/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /?p??.?.da?s/

Noun

paradise (countable and uncountable, plural paradises)

1. (chiefly religion) The place where sanctified souls are believed to live after death.

   Synonym: Heaven

   • 1611, King James Version of the Bible, Luke 23.43,^[2]

     And Jesus said unto him [the malefactor], Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.

   • 1791, Charlotte Lennox, Hermione, London: William Lane, Volume 1, p. 123,^[3]

     This employment I considered as the only satisfaction I could offer to the memory of your unfortunate mother, and I flatter myself that if she could look down, it would give her angelic mind pleasure even in paradise, to behold me instilling into the minds of her children, sentiments congenial with her own.

   • 2004, Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, London: Virago, 2005, p. 189,^[4]

     I believe the soul in Paradise must enjoy something nearer to a perpetual adulthood than to any other state we know.

2. (Abrahamic religions) A garden where Adam and Eve first lived after being created.

   Synonym: Garden of Eden

   • c. 1589, William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3,^[5]

     Not that Adam that kept the Paradise but that Adam that keeps the prison:

   • 1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 9, lines 17-18,^[6]

     Up into Heav’n from Paradise in hast

     Th’ Angelic Guards ascended,

   • 1776, Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Philadelphia, p. 1,^[7]

     Government like dress is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.

   • 1851, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 132,^[8]

     I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.

3. (figuratively) A very pleasant place; a place full of lush vegetation.

   Synonym: heaven

   • c. 1611, William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1,^[9]

     Let me live here ever;

     So rare a wonder’d father and a wife

     Makes this place Paradise.

   • 1789, Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, London: for the author, Volume 1, Chapter 6, p. 243,^[10]

     The reader cannot but judge of the irksomeness of this situation to a mind like mine, in being daily exposed to new hardships and impositions, after having seen many better days, and been as it were, in a state of freedom and plenty; added to which, every part of the world I had hitherto been in, seemed to me a paradise in comparison of the West Indies.

   • 1883, Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 40,^[11]

     And at this point, also, begins the pilot’s paradise: a wide river hence to New Orleans, abundance of water from shore to shore, and no bars, snags, sawyers, or wrecks in his road.

   • 1968, Bessie Head, When Rain Clouds Gather, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969, Chapter 8, p. 114,^[12]

     “Each household will have to have a tap with water running out of it all the year round,” he said. “And not only palm trees, but fruit trees too and flower gardens. It won’t take so many years to turn Golema Mmidi into a paradise. […] ”

4. (figuratively) A very pleasant experience.
   • c. 1604, William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act III, Scene 1,^[13]

     The weariest and most loathed worldly life

     That age, ache, penury and imprisonment

     Can lay on nature is a paradise

     To what we fear of death.

   • 1847, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Chapter 23,^[14]

     […] sitting by him, roused from the nightmare of parting—called to the paradise of union—I thought only of the bliss given me to drink in so abundant a flow.

   • 1979, Bernard Malamud, Dubin’s Lives, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, Chapter 2, p. 62,^[15]

     He poured the last of the wine as Fanny, her face composed as she stroked his leg, after a paradise of expectation touched his aroused organ.

5. (architecture, obsolete) An open space within a monastery or adjoining a church, such as the space within a cloister, the open court before a basilica, etc.
6. (obsolete) A churchyard or cemetery.
7. (slang) The upper gallery in a theatre.

Derived terms

See also

• Abraham's bosom
• Arcadia
• Avalon
• Eden
• happy hunting ground
• kingdom come
• nirvana
• Shangri-La
• sweet hereafter
• utopia

Translations

Verb

paradise (third-person singular simple present paradises, present participle paradising, simple past and past participle paradised)

1. To place (as) in paradise.

   Synonym: imparadise

   • 1623, Giles Fletcher, The Reward of the Faithfull, London: Benjamin Fisher, Part 2, Chapter 1, p. 141,^[16]

     Man himselfe […] euen then, when hee was first paradis’d in the Garden of pleasure, yet had something to doe in it, and was not suffered to walke idlely vp & downe like a Loyterer […]

   • 1632, Thomas Heywood, The Iron Age, London, Act IV, Scene 1,^[17]

     Hadst thou seene

     Her, in whose breast my heart was paradis’d,

     Kist, courted, and imbrac’d.

   • 1652, Edward Benlowes, Theophila, or, Loves Sacrifice, London: Henry Seile and Humphrey Moseley, Canto 7, stanza 81, p. 105,^[18]

     Yet dy’dst THOU not, but that (Spîrit quickned) free

     THOU might’st Saints Paradised see,

     Rejoyc’d Assurance give to Them rejoyc’d in THEE!

   • 1763, uncredited translator, “An Epistle of M. de Voltaire, upon his arrival at his estate near the Lake of Geneva, in March, 1755” in Francis Fawkes and William Woty (eds.), The Poetical Calendar, London: J. Coote, Volume 12, p. 48,^[19]

     […] blest thro’ every hour

     With blissful change of pleasure and of power,

     Couldst thou, thus paradis’d, from care remote,

     Rush to the world, and fight for Peter’s boat?

   • 1995, Anthony Burgess, Byrne, New York: Carroll & Graf, Part 2, p. 63,^[20]

     […] A near-nude dance of dates,

     Brilliant in darkness — 1617,

     Then 1500, and so back, gyrates

     To reach — harsh braking on the Time Machine —

     To 1321, anno felice

     For Dante, paradised with Beatrice.

2. (obsolete) To transform into a paradise.
   • 1613, Thomas Heywood, “Epithalamion” in A Marriage Triumphe Solemnized in an Epithalamium, London: Edward Marchant,^[21]

     She enters with a sweet commanding grace,

     Her very presence paradic’d the place:

   • 1828, Ann Willson, letter to her brother, in Familiar Letters of Ann Willson, Philadelphia: Wm. D. Parrish & Co., 1850, pp. 84-85,^[22]

     Then let us individually aim at paradising the world, and these efforts, though feeble, would doubtless be blessed to ourselves […]

3. (obsolete, rare) To affect or exalt with visions of happiness.

   Synonyms: entrance, bewitch

   • 1606, John Marston, Parasitaster, or The Fawn, London: W. Cotton, Act IV,^[23]#*: O we had first some long fortunate greate Politicians that were so sottishlie paradized as to thinke when popular hate seconded Princes displeasure to them, any vnmerited violence could seeme to the world iniustice,

References

Anagrams

• Paradesi

Latin

Noun

parad?se

1. vocative singular of parad?sus