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eternal

adjectivenouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ɪˈtɜː.nl̩//
  • United States//ɪˈtɝ.nl̩//
  • United States//iˈtɝ.nl̩//

Lasting forever; unending.

adjective

  1. 1

    Lasting forever; unending.

    But here again it is another question, quite different from our having an idea of eternity, to know whether there were any real being, whose duration has been eternal.

    Thy smoking altar shall be fat with food / Of incense and the grateful steam of blood; / Burnt-offerings morn and evening shall be thine, / And fires eternal in thy temple shine.

    Organic life is nothing but a genetic mutation, an accident. Your lives are measured in years and decades. You wither and die. We are eternal. The pinnacle of evolution and existence. Before us, you are nothing. Your extinction is inevitable. We are the end of everything.

    In a bid to understand the eternal mystery that is woman, Bart goes to the least qualified possible source for advice and counsel: his father, who remarkably seems to have made it to his mid-30s without quite figuring out much of anything.

  2. 2

    Existing outside time; as opposed to sempiternal, existing within time but everlastingly.

  3. 3

    Constant; perpetual; ceaseless; ever-present.

    Beneath him you might have seen the three of us - myself, sunburnt, young, and vigorous after our open-air tramp; Summerlee, solemn but still critical, behind his eternal pipe; Lord John, as keen as a razor-edge, with his supple, alert figure leaning upon his rifle, and his eager eyes fixed eagerly upon the speaker.

  4. 4

    datedExceedingly great or bad; used as an intensifier.

    some eternal villain

Etymology

From Middle English eternal, from Old French eternal, from Late Latin aeternālis, from Latin aeternus (“eternal”), from aevum (“age”). Displaced native Old English ēċe.

noun

  1. 1

    One who lives forever; an immortal.

    Yes, I want that raw power that is only offered to the eternals or creators

Forms

plural
eternals
comparative
more eternal
superlative
most eternal
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).