Crossword clues for firmament
firmament
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Firmament \Fir"ma*ment\, n. [L. firmamentum, fr. firmare to make firm: cf. F. firmament. See Firm, v. & a.]
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Fixed foundation; established basis. [Obs.]
Custom is the . . . firmament of the law.
--Jer. Taylor. -
The region of the air; the sky or heavens.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
--Gen. i. 6.And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament.
--Gen. i. 14.Note: In Scripture, the word denotes an expanse, a wide extent; the great arch or expanse over out heads, in which are placed the atmosphere and the clouds, and in which the stars appear to be placed, and are really seen.
(Old Astron.) The orb of the fixed stars; the most rmote of the celestial spheres.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
mid-13c., from Old French firmament or directly from Latin firmamentum "firmament," literally "a support, a strengthening," from firmus "strong, steadfast, enduring" (see firm (adj.)). Used in Late Latin in the Vulgate to translate Greek stereoma "firm or solid structure," which translated Hebrew raqia, a word used of both the vault of the sky and the floor of the earth in the Old Testament, probably literally "expanse," from raqa "to spread out," but in Syriac meaning "to make firm or solid," hence the erroneous translation. Related: Firmamental.
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context uncountable English) The vault of the heavens; the sky. 2 (context obsolete English) basis. 3 The field or sphere of an interest or activity. 4 (context archaic English) In the geocentric Ptolemaic system, the eighth sphere, which carried the fixed stars.
WordNet
n. the apparent surface of the imaginary sphere on which celestial bodies appear to be projected [syn: celestial sphere, sphere, empyrean, heavens, vault of heaven, welkin]
Wikipedia
In Biblical cosmology, the firmament is the structure above the atmosphere, conceived as a vast solid dome. According to the Genesis creation narrative, God created the firmament to separate the "waters above" the earth from the "waters below" the earth. The word is anglicized from Latin firmamentum, which appears in the Vulgate, a late fourth-century Latin translation of the Bible.
Usage examples of "firmament".
Two years ago the hull of the Divine Firmament was ripped open and the command module compartment amputated except for a few meters, just enough to contain the cabinets of a new computer system designed by a prominent research scientist named Onasuka, a biocomputer pioneer who took the previous technology of the Destiny II ship control system, the Second Captain, and modified it.
Cal had felt when he woke on Venus Mountain did not falter as he and de Bono made their way down the slope towards the Firmament.
To them, all the lights of the firmament were created only to give light to the earth, as its lamps or candles hung above it.
Garage, on the former site of New York, to witness a fistic encounter between two renowned champions of the strange-story firmament -- Two-Gun Bob, the Terror of the Plains, and Knockout Bernie, the Wild Wolf of West Shokan.
And it finally culminated in the following frightful picture which still lowers and blazes in the imagination of ecclesiastical Christendom as a veritable revelation of what is to take place at the end of the world: While the stars are falling, the firmament dissolving, the dead swarming from their graves, and the nations assembling, Christ will come in the clouds of heaven with a host of angels and sit in judgment on collected mankind.
Then it had lighted up window by window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided and deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and had itself become a starry firmament of dream, redolent of faery music, and one with the marvels of Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious and halffabulous cities.
Every shining speck in the firmament is, no doubt, a luminous Sun, resembling our own, at least in its general features, and having in attendance upon it a greater or less number of planets, greater or less, whose still lingering luminosity is not sufficient to render them visible to us at so vast a distance, but which, nevertheless, revolve, moon-attended, about their starry centres, in obedience to the principles just detailed--in obedience to the three omniprevalent laws of revolution, the three immortal laws guessed by the imaginative Kepler, and but subsequently demonstrated and accounted for by the patient and mathematical Newton.
What modem thought is to throw fundamentally into question is the relation of meaning with the form of truth and the form of being: in the firmament of our reflection there reigns a discourse - a perhaps inaccessible discourse -which would at the same time be an ontology and a semantics.
A mightier work than the Pyramids, a finer work than a refashioned chromosome, the ship moved on toward a Saturn which had become the second brightest beacon in the firmament.
Let your mind have its nightly firmament of religious communion, beneath which white and sable memories shall walk, and the sphered spirits of your risen friends, like stars, shed down their holy rays to soothe your feverish cares and hush every murmuring doubt to rest.
Switches drove home, most of the fabric of the enemy vessel went out of phase, the voyagers experienced the weirdly uncomfortable acceleration along an impossible vector, and the familiar firmament disappeared into an impalpable but impenetrable murk of featureless, textureless gray.
The reason smaller body impact had never been considered for Thunderstrike was that the comet was alone in the firmament.
Re, the son of Phtha, and his wife, Tiphe, the celestial firmament, 254-m.
Olney should mark the gray unvisited cottage in the sky, on that sinister northward crag which is one with the mists and the firmament.
Perhaps they were simply thoughts in the head of Iad Uroboros, and he was present in the midst of some Iadic vision of heaven and hell: a firmament of unfinished angels, a pit of nonsenses and in between a sprawling and infinitely complex web of knotted and corrupted memories.