Faith & RitualGreek → English
Paradise
/ˈpærədaɪs/noun
Heaven, or any place of complete beauty and contentment.
The Greek roots
παράδεισος
parádeisos
enclosed park
Literally: “walled enclosure”
Follow a root:παράδεισος1 word
The story of the word
Persian nobles kept walled game parks, and Old Persian pairidaeza named the wall around them. Xenophon saw the things in Asia Minor and wrote παράδεισος. When the Septuagint translators needed a word for the garden of Eden, they reached for his, and that one decision pushed a Persian estate wall into every Christian language as the name of heaven. English had paradise by 1200, still meaning a garden as often as an afterlife.
- How it travelled
- Old Persian → Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 13th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
In a sentence
Two weeks with no phone signal was, he insisted, paradise.