The Collaborative International Dictionary
Beatify \Be*at"i*fy\ (b[-e]*[a^]t"[i^]*f[imac]), v. t. [imp. & p. p. Beatified (b[-e]*[a^]t"[i^]*f[imac]d); p. pr. & vb. n. Beatifying.] [L. beatificare; beatus happy (fr. beare to bless, akin to bonus good) + facere to make: cf. F. b['e]atifier. See Bounty.]
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To pronounce or regard as happy, or supremely blessed, or as conferring happiness.
The common conceits and phrases that beatify wealth.
--Barrow. To make happy; to bless with the completion of celestial enjoyment. ``Beatified spirits.''
--Dryden.(R. C. Ch.) To ascertain and declare, by a public process and decree, that a deceased person is one of ``the blessed,'' and is to be reverenced as such, though not canonized.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1530s, "to make very happy," from Middle French béatifer, from Late Latin beatificare "make happy, make blessed," from Latin beatus "supremely happy, blessed" (past participle of beare "make happy, bless") + -ficare, from stem of facere "to make, do" (see factitious). The Roman Catholic Church sense of "to pronounce as being in heavenly bliss" (1620s) is the first step toward canonization. Related: Beatified; beatifying.
Wiktionary
vb. 1 (context transitive English) To make blissful. 2 (context transitive English) To pronounce or regard as happy, or supremely blessed, or as conferring happiness. 3 (context transitive Roman Catholicism English) To carry out the third of four steps in canonization, making someone a saint.
WordNet
v. fill with sublime emotion; tickle pink (exhilarate is obsolete in this usage); "The children were thrilled at the prospect of going to the movies"; "He was inebriated by his phenomenal success" [syn: exhilarate, inebriate, thrill, exalt]
make blessedly happy
declare (a dead person) to be blessed; the first step of achieving sainthood; "On Sunday, the martyr will be beatified by the Vatican"
[also: beatified]
Usage examples of "beatify".
And then her fancy pictured her new home and all its delights, till her eyes were suffused with tender feeling, as her imagination sketched a variety of scenes--the pleasant labours of cultivation, the rides, the hunting, the boating, all common-place occurrences, which, attended on by love, were exalted into a perpetual gorgeous procession of beatified hours.
She sat in her day-dream long after Bathsheba had left her, her eyes fixed, not on the faded portrait of her beatified ancestress, but on that other canvas where the dead Beauty seemed to live in all the splendors of her full-blown womanhood.
They stumbled and got up, walked on or stood still, bodily as well as spiritually hand in hand, at moments performing the great chain of a beatified lanciers.
He did not bother to go looking for the odious matron, or even worry about whether she would find him again, for he knew that his portrayal of the beatified Simple Simon infected with cupidity and dazzled by the potentialities of his own newly discovered acumen was as polished as it had ever been in the days when he used to exploit it more frequently, and he was confident that an angler like Mr Eade could be relied on not to let such an obviously well-hooked fish escape the gaff.
The change consisted in the appearance of strange faces of low caste, rather than in the disappearance of the high-caste, chiseled, and otherwise beatified and beatifying features of Monseigneur.
Pierre de Luxem burg was ultimately beatified but not canonized in 1527.
As he now walked along thinking, with a lover's beatified smile on his face, of how Margaret Vance had spoken and looked, he dramatized scenes in which be approved himself to her by acts of goodness and unselfishness, and died to please her for the sake of others.
I clasped with my soul the fulness of contentment, satisfied, undesiring, beatified.