The Collaborative International Dictionary
Wednesday \Wednes"day\ (?; 48), n. [OE. wednesdai, wodnesdei, AS. W[=o]dnes d[ae]g, i. e., Woden's day (a translation of L. dies Mercurii); fr. W[=o]den the highest god of the Teutonic peoples, but identified with the Roman god Mercury; akin to OS. W[=o]dan, OHG. Wuotan, Icel. O[eth]inn, D. woensdag Wednesday, Icel. [=o][eth]insdagr, Dan. & Sw. onsdag. See Day, and cf. Woden, Wood, a.] The fourth day of the week; the next day after Tuesday.
Ash Wednesday. See in the Vocabulary.
Ash Wednesday \Ash` Wednes"day\ ([a^]sh` w[e^]nz"d[asl]). The first day of Lent; -- so called from a custom in the Roman Catholic church of putting ashes, on that day, upon the foreheads of penitents.
Wiktionary
n. A Christian day of penitence, the first day of Lent. It is a movable feast which takes place 40 days before Easter (excluding Sundays).
Wikipedia
Ash Wednesday, a day of fasting, is the first day of Lent in Western Christianity. It occurs 46 days (40 fasting days, if the six Sundays, which are not days of fast, are excluded) before Easter and can fall as early as February 4 or as late as March 10. Ash Wednesday is observed by many Western Christians, including Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics.
According to the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus Christ spent 40 days fasting in the desert, where he endured temptation by Satan. Lent originated as a mirroring of this, fasting 40 days as preparation for Easter. Every Sunday was seen as a commemoration of the Sunday of Christ's resurrection and so as a feast day on which fasting was inappropriate. Accordingly, Christians fasted from Monday to Saturday (six days) during six weeks and from Wednesday to Saturday (four days) in the preceding week, thus making up the number of 40 days. Orthodox do this 40 days in a row.
Ash Wednesday derives its name from the practice of blessing ashes made from palm branches blessed on the previous year's Palm Sunday, and placing them on the heads of participants to the accompaniment of the words "Repent, and believe in the Gospel" or "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return".
Ash Wednesday is an Australian musician, who played in JAB, the Models and Einstürzende Neubauten.
Ash Wednesday is a Christian religious holiday.
Ash Wednesday may also refer to:
- Ash Wednesday (album), the debut album by Elvis Perkins released in 2007
- Ash Wednesday (1958 film), a Mexican film
- Ash Wednesday (1973 film), starring Elizabeth Taylor
- Ash Wednesday (2002 film)
- Ash Wednesday (musician), an Australian musician
- "Ash Wednesday" (poem), by T.S. Eliot
- Ash Wednesday fires, a series of bushfires in Australia in February, 1983
- Ash Wednesday Quake, a nickname for the 2001 Nisqually earthquake
- Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962, a strong nor'easter which battered the East Coast of the United States in 1962
Ash Wednesday (sometimes Ash-Wednesday) is the first long poem written by T. S. Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, this poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God.
Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", Ash-Wednesday, with a base of Dante's Purgatorio, is richly but ambiguously allusive and deals with the move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. The style is different from his poetry which predates his conversion. "Ash-Wednesday" and the poems that followed had a more casual, melodic, and contemplative method.
Many critics were "particularly enthusiastic concerning 'Ash-Wednesday, while in other quarters it was not well received. Among many of the more secular literati its groundwork of orthodox Christianity was discomfiting. Edwin Muir maintained that Ash-Wednesday' is one of the most moving poems he [Eliot] has written, and perhaps the most perfect."
Ash Wednesday is a 2002 crime drama film starring Edward Burns, Elijah Wood, and Rosario Dawson. The film is set in the Hell's Kitchen of the early 1980s and is about a pair of Irish-American brothers who become embroiled in a conflict with the Irish mob.
Ash Wednesday is a 1973 American drama film starring Elizabeth Taylor, directed by Larry Peerce and produced by Dominick Dunne.
The screenplay by Jean-Claude Tramont focuses on the effect that extensive cosmetic surgery has on the life of a middle-aged married woman.
Ash Wednesday is a 1958 Mexican drama film directed by Roberto Gavaldón. It was entered into the 8th Berlin International Film Festival.
Ash Wednesday is the debut studio album by singer songwriter Elvis Perkins, released on February 20, 2007, on XL Recordings. It is a chronologically sequenced album of songs written before (Tracks 1 to 6) and after (Tracks 7 to 11) the death of his mother, who died on 9/11. In a 2009 interview, Perkins states that the album "[has] been made out to be bleaker than it really is, [...] there were moments of hopefulness on Ash Wednesday too."
Regarding the album's title, Perkins states that it:
refers to being left on Wednesday with nothing but ash, because [my mother] died on a Tuesday - being left with ash on September 12. That was also the day my father died, September 12 [1992, of complications from AIDS]. It first occurred to me on Ash Wednesday itself - my consciousness was largely ruled by having lost my mother six months previously.
"All the Night Without Love" was the lead single off the album; "Moon Woman II" appears on the Fast Food Nation soundtrack, and "While You Were Sleeping" was featured in a season 4 episode of The O.C.. The album was released on XL Records and includes backing vocals by Ariana Lenarsky, Shana Levy of indie band Let's Go Sailing, and others.
Usage examples of "ash wednesday".
We were driving from Chicago to New Orleans in an attempt to make Mardi Gras, which we would miss by a full day, arriving on Ash Wednesday, because in the next five miles we would spin out across the snow-covered highway, escape being piledriven by an oncoming truck by inches, plunge off the side of the road, and bury the Corvette headfirst to its rear wheels in snowbanks fifteen feet deep.
We have to assume, therefore, that the fact of its being Ash Wednesday is significant.
In the garbage-strewn, hungover hush of Ash Wednesday, a letter arrived from Wiggs Dannyboy.
At the end of February, '48, soon after Ash Wednesday -- I had lost weight during carnival and may have been looking rather ethereal, for some of the girls at the Lions' Den took to calling me Doctor -- the first peasants from the left bank of the Rhine came over to look at our offerings.
Otherwise Molochai and Twig had changed not at all since Christian last saw them, waving goodbye from the windows of their van on that Ash Wednesday night fifteen years ago.
He brushed his hair back from his forehead, leaving a fresh smear and now making her think of penitents on Ash Wednesday.
On 15 March, Ash Wednesday, his charismatic hate-filled oratory aroused his parishioners to such a frenzy that they stormed from his church toward the Jewish quarter of Seville.
All I need is one going the other way and I would look like a Papist on Ash Wednesday.
A fever that seizes the town every year, on the last Tuesday before Ash Wednesday.
But the answer was yes, and so I found myself in the midst of the second improbability, Las Vegas on Ash Wednesday.