celestial empire
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 3.49 in modern English
21
Scrabble Score
15
Letters
4
Syllables
10
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
The Empire of China.
Example Sentences
- "Among the leading features of the quincuplex troupe are / A Party of Chinese Jugglers and Artists / Recently arrived from the Celestial Empire, […]"
- "And then he possessed the most delightful chinoiseries—trophies of his sojourn in the Celestial Empire: pagodas of ebony and cabinets of ivory; sculpted monsters, […]."
- "It is true, there is Turkish of which I had picked up a few phrases, and there is Chinese of which I did not understand a single word. But I had no fear of remaining dumb in Turkestan and the Celestial Empire."
- "Had it not been for the casual discovery in the year 1625 of a deeply buried black marble tablet near Hsi-an containing nearly 1,700 Chinese characters, and a long list of names of priests in Syriac, the fact that such a sect rooted itself in the Celestial Empire would never have been believed, as indeed after the tablet was unearthed it was for a long time discredited."
- "LIKE THE MANDARINS of old, the rulers of China live behind high walls. When they emerge, which they rarely do, they travel in cars with rear windows curtained like sedan chairs. They live in the Chung Nan Hai, a walled park adjacent to the Forbidden City from where ancient dynasties ruled the Celestial Empire."
- "[…] Does China want to supplant the U.S. wholesale as the global superpower[…]? Or does it want to retreat and become the celestial empire once more, as the Qing dynasty once called itself—close the doors against all of the barbarians, seize Taiwan because it must[,] to fulfill the aims of Mao in the Civil War, and mostly dominate its near neighbors?"
Etymology
Calque of Literary Chinese 天朝 (Tiāncháo).
Inflected Forms
the Celestial Empire (canonical)