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Allin

destiny

nouncommon in dialogue

  • Canada//ˈdɛs.tɪ.ni//
  • Australia//ˈdes.tɪ.ni//

That to which any person or thing is destined; a predetermined state; a condition predestined by the Divine or by human will.

noun

  1. 1

    That to which any person or thing is destined; a predetermined state; a condition predestined by the Divine or by human will.

    Death is the destiny of all mortal men.

    Her death (April 18, 1881) left the Empress Ts‘ŭ Hsi, the playmate of her youth, the sole Regent of China, with the destiny of four hundred millions of human beings in her hands.

    And nothing can keep him from me / He is my destiny

  2. 2

    That which is inevitable in the fullness of time.

    Ain't no use to fight it / Don't tamper with my destiny / Any way you slice it / I'm in the hands of fate, you see

  3. 3

    One's eventual fate (not necessarily inevitable or predestined).

    Everywhere the atom bombs are dropping / It's the end of all humanity / No more time for last-minute shopping / It's time to face your final destiny

    Suspended between two ancient trees in some woody wonderland, the nearby brook babblingly bubbling to itself, the gently cooling breezes sweeping away all things bothersome, we self-sway each other to our own rhythms, and all our manifest destinies are ahhhsome.

  4. 4

    The fixed order of things; invincible necessity; an irresistible power or agency conceived of as determining the future, whether in general or of an individual.

    Dara doesn't believe in using dating apps - she insists that destiny will find her other half.

    There were two kinds of beardom opposed here, two futures, two destinies.

Etymology

From Middle English destine et al., from Old French destinee, from Latin dēstinō (English destine). Displaced Old English wyrd.

Forms

plural
destinies
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).