Definition of "paradise"
paradise
noun
countable and uncountable, plural paradises
(chiefly religion) The place where sanctified souls are believed to live after death.
Quotations
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.
1791, Charlotte Lennox, “Hermione”, in London, volume 1, William Lane, page 123
He hears his daughter's voice, / Singing in the village choir, / And it makes his heart rejoice. / It sounds to him like her mother's voice, / Singing in Paradise!
1839, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “[Miscellaneous.] The Village Blacksmith.”, in Ballads and Other Poems, 2nd edition, Cambridge, Mass.: […] John Owen, published 1842, stanzas 5–6, page 101
Kruban is a tidally-locked Venusian hothouse, its surface perpetually obscured by clouds of sulfur and carbon dioxides. The first group of krogan brought into orbit by the salarian uplift teams requested a trip to Kruban. The salarians at first thought the krogan were confused about the nature of Kruban's environment; the planet is named for a krogan mythological paradise in which honorable warriors feast on the internal organs of their enemies. In fact, krogan astronomers had correctly deduced the nature of Kruban in the years before the global holocaust.
2010, BioWare, Mass Effect 2 (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, PC, scene: Kruban
(Abrahamic religions) A garden where Adam and Eve first lived after being created.
Quotations
Not that Adam that kept the Paradise but that Adam that keeps the prison:
c. 1594 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Comedie of Errors”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act IV, scene iii]
(figuratively) A very pleasant place, such as a place full of lush vegetation.
Quotations
Let me live here ever;So rare a wonder’d father and a wifeMakes this place Paradise.
1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act IV, scene i]
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.
1789, Olaudah Equiano, chapter 6, in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, volume 1, London: for the author, page 243
“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. […] ”
1968, Bessie Head, chapter 8, in When Rain Clouds Gather, New York: Simon & Schuster, published 1969, page 114
On Earth, there is no poverty, no crime, no war. You look out the window of Starfleet Headquarters and you see paradise. Well, it's easy to be a saint in paradise, but the Maquis do not live in paradise.
1994, Ira Steven Behr, “The Maquis, Part II”, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 2, episode 21, spoken by Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks)
(figuratively) An ideal place for a specified type of person, activity, etc.
Quotations
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.
1883, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter 40, in Life on the Mississippi, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company
(figuratively) A very pleasant experience.
Quotations
The weariest and most loathed worldly lifeThat age, ache, penury and imprisonmentCan lay on nature is a paradiseTo what we fear of death.
c. 1603–1604 (date written), William Shakespeare, “Measure for Measure”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act III, scene i]
[…] 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.
1847 October 16, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], chapter VIII, in Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. […], volume II, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], page 214
(obsolete) A churchyard or cemetery.
A cake, often as a paradise slice.
Quotations
She was learned in decocting all kinds of herb-tea, infallible in curing burns, sprains, and scalds; and not a few pennyworths of gingerbread and paradise (for the latter she was very famous) went among her young customers, for which the till was never the richer.
1832, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Heath's Book of Beauty, 1833, The Knife, page 127
verb
third-person singular simple present paradises, present participle paradising, simple past and past participle paradised
Quotations
[…] 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?
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
(obsolete) To transform into a paradise.
Quotations
[…] come all the daintieſt dainties of this toungue, and doe homage to your verticall ſtarre, that hath all the ſoveraine influences of the eloquent and learned conſtellations at a becke, and paradiſeth the earth with the ambroſiall dewes of his incomprehenſible witt!
1593, Gabriel Harvey, Pierces Supererogation: Or A New Prayse of the Old Asse, London: […] Iohn Wolfe; republished as John Payne Collier, editor, Pierces Supererogation: Or A New Prayse of the Old Asse. A Preparative to Certaine Larger Discourses, Intituled Nashes S. Fame (Miscellaneous Tracts. Temp. Eliz. & Jac. I; no. 8), [London: [s.n.], 1870], page 177