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gospel

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɡɒspəl//
  • United States//ˈɡɑspəl//

The first section of the Christian New Testament scripture, comprising the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, concerned with the birth, ministry, passion, and resurrection of Jesus.

noun

  1. 1

    The first section of the Christian New Testament scripture, comprising the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, concerned with the birth, ministry, passion, and resurrection of Jesus.

  2. 2

    An account of those aspects of Jesus' life, generally written during the first several centuries of the Common Era.

  3. 3

    The teaching of Divine grace as distinguished from the Law or Divine commandments.

  4. 4

    A message expected to have positive reception or effect, one promoted as offering important (or even infallible) guiding principles.

    Spreading the gospel of dental hygiene in Vermont

  5. 5

    That which is absolutely authoritative (definitive).

    took her words for gospel

    If any one thinks this expression hyperbolical, I shall only ask him to read Edipus, instead of taking the traditional witticisms about Lee for gospel.

  6. 6

    Gospel music.

Etymology

From Middle English gospel, gospell, godspel, godspell, goddspell, from Old English godspell (“gospel”), corresponding to God + spell (“talk, tale, story”), literally “the message of God”, believed to be an alteration of earlier *gōdspell (literally “good news”), used to translate ecclesiastical Latin bona annūntiātiō, itself a translation of Ecclesiastical Latin ēvangelium / Ancient Greek εὐαγγέλιον (euangélion, “evangel”, literally “good news”) (English evangel). Compare Old Saxon gōdspel and godspell (“gospel”), Old High German and Middle High German gotspel (“gospel”), Icelandic guðspjall (“gospel”), and the modern calque Malayalam സുവിശേഷം (suviśēṣaṁ).

verb

  1. 1

    To instruct in, declare, or communicate the gospel; to evangelise.

    Are you so gospelled, to pray for this good man and for his issue, whose heavy hand hath bowed you to the grave and beggared yours forever?

    I stood there wondering how often they had “gospeled” each other's hearts like this.

    Hopefully you will get to the point where gospeling one another becomes a natural part of your language, and you will not need a set of phrases anymore.

    But the very act of “seeing” for anyone—both those within and beyond the fold of Christian communions—is possible only as a gospel being gospeled anew in and through the most pertinent issues of their particular contexts.

Etymology

From Middle English gospellen, from Old English godspellian (“to preach the gospel, evangelise”), from the noun (see above).

Forms

plural
gospels
past tense
gospeled, gospelled
past participle
gospeled, gospelled
present participle
gospeling, gospelling
third person singular
gospels
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).