uranian
/jʊˈɹeɪniən/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.47 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
3
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Homosexual; also, pederastic; relating to a man's erotic love for adolescent boys; (specifically) of poetry: conveying appreciation for young men.
Archaic; Literary
adj
Of Aphrodite Urania, the heavenly aspect of the Greek goddess of beauty and love Aphrodite and her Roman counterpart Venus, as contrasted with the earthly aspect known as Aphrodite Pandemos: heavenly, spiritual.
adj
Of or pertaining to astronomy; astronomical.
noun
A male homosexual; also, a pederast; a man engaged in an erotic relationship with an adolescent boy.
Archaic; Literary
adj
Of or pertaining to the planet Uranus.
noun
An inhabitant of the planet Uranus.
Example Sentences
- "Hence is that secret pardon we bestow / In the true instinct of the grateful heart, / Upon the Sons of Song. The good they do / In the clear world of their Uranian art / Endures for ever; while the evil done / In the poor drama of the mortal scene, / Is but a passing cloud before the sun; [...]"
- "Hail thou! sole Muse that, in an age of toil, / Of all the old Uranian sisterhood, / Art left to light us o'er the furrowed soil, / Of this laborious star!"
- "At first sight the winds would appear to be if anything Ouranian powers of the upper air, yet it seems that sacrifices to the winds were buried, not burnt."
- "[T]hose deities which are called ‘chthonic’ or earthly are, as a matter of fact, not in any sense deities of the earth. They are, in one of their aspects associated with the ‘underworld,’ but that underworld is but a segment of their cycle; they are deities of the underworld not because they appertain to the earth or are in any sense a personification of it, but because they are, on the contrary, heavenly bodies which, in the course of their cycle, pass under the earth. They are therefore just as much ‘uranian’ as are the Olympians."
- "If he [the Hindu god Varuna] cannot be classed exclusively among the "gods of the sky" he nevertheless has qualities proper to the ouranian divinities. He is visva-darsata, "everywhere visible", he "separated the two worlds", the wind is his breath; [...]"
- "Conversely, Kenneth Anger's only widely released film since 1972, Lucifer Rising (1980), uses a megalithic temple (not Stonehenge) and a number of ancient Egyptian sites in a Crowleyan ritual hymn to chthonian and ouranian deities of power and light."
Etymology
From Latin Ūrania (“muse of astronomy in Greek mythology”) + -an (suffix forming agent nouns). Ūrania is derived from Ancient Greek Οὐρᾰνῐ́ᾱ (Ourănĭ́ā, “muse of astronomy”), from οὐράνιος (ouránios, “of or relating to the sky, celestial, heavenly”) (from οὐρανός (ouranós, “the sky; heaven, home of the gods; the universe”), probably ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₁wers- (“rain”)) + -ιος (-ios, suffix forming adjectives meaning ‘pertaining to’). The alternative form Ouranian is derived from Ancient Greek οὐράνιος (ouránios). Adjective sense 2 (“homosexual”) and the noun sense (“a homosexual”) refer to Plato’s work Symposium (c. 385–370 B.C.E.), where the goddess Aphrodite, in her heavenly aspect Aphrodite Urania (see adjective sense 3) is described as inspiring a noble form of affection between older and younger men. Compare German Urning (“a homosexual, Uranian”), Urnigtum (“homosexuality”), also referring to Aphrodite Urania, coined by the German writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) in 1864. By the 1900s, the use of the word in this sense had largely been supplanted by homosexual (see further at that entry). The term is no longer mainstream and is almost never used in modern contexts, though it has enjoyed a slight revival as a term for "gay man" as an analogue to lesbian.
Origin
- Source language: Latin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /jʊˈɹeɪniən/
- British English: /jʊˈɹeɪnɪən/
Usage
Inflected Forms
Phrases
trans-uranian