Rapture

Pronunciation

Origin

Latin raptūra, future active participle of rapiō ("snatch, carry off")

Full definition of rapture

Noun

1. Extreme pleasure, happiness or excitement.
• AddisonMusic, when thus applied, raises in the mind of the hearer great conceptions; it strengthens devotion, and advances praise into rapture.
• 1918, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Land That Time Forgot (novel) Chapter VIIMy heart filled with rapture then, and it fills now as it has each of the countless times I have recalled those dear words, as it shall fill always until death has claimed me. I may never see her again; she may not know how I love her--she may question, she may doubt; but always true and steady, and warm with the fires of love my heart beats for the girl who said that night: "I love you beyond all conception."
2. In some forms of fundamentalist Protestant eschatology, the event when Jesus returns and gathers the souls of living believers. (Usually "the rapture.")
3. (obsolete) The act of kidnapping or abducting, especially the forceful carrying off of a woman.
4. (obsolete) Rape; ravishment; sexual violation.
5. (obsolete) The act of carrying, conveying, transporting or sweeping along by force of movement; the force of such movement; the fact of being carried along by such movement.
• ChapmanThat 'gainst a rock, or flat, her keel did dash
  With headlong rapture.
• 1888 James Russell Lowell, Agassiz 6.1.21:With the rapture of great winds to blow
  About earth's shaken coignes.
6. A spasm; a fit; a syncope; delirium.

Verb

1. (dated, transitive) To cause to experience great happiness or excitement.
• 2012, The Books They Gave Me: True Stories of Life, Love, and Lit, page 138:She raptured me in summer by giving me Fitzgerald's flawed and gorgeous masterpiece, the book that held his tortured heart.
2. (dated, intransitive) To experience great happiness or excitement.
3. (transitive) To take (someone) off the Earth and bring (them) to Heaven as part of the Rapture.
• 2010, Gerald Mizejewski, ‎Jerimiah Asher, Charting the Supernatural Judgements of Planet Earth (page 233)The third person raptured by God into heaven was Elijah ...
• 2011, Lexi George, Demon Hunting in Dixie (ISBN 0758271816)“Praise the Lord, he's been raptured.” Good grief. “I don't think so, Mrs. Farris. 'Course, I'm Episcopalian, and I'm pretty sure we don't get raptured. But, Baptists get raptured, don't they?”
4. (rare, intransitive) To take part in the Rapture; to leave Earth and go to Heaven as part of the .
• 2001, Allan Appel, Club Revelation: A Novel, page 320:"If she's raptured," Ellen said to them on the fifth night after Marylee's disappearance, as they sat on the roof of the building on their old beanbags and rusting garden furniture hauled up from the Museum, "if that's what happened to her, then ..."
5. (uncommon) To state (something, transitive) or talk (intransitive) rapturously.
• 1885, Edward Everett Hale, G.T.T.; or, The Wonderful Adventures of a Pullman, page 158:And then the flowers! May-day indeed. Hester had been in Switzerland at the end of June, years on years before, and often had she raptured to Effie about the day's ride, in which they collected a hundred varieties of flowers, most of them new to them.
• 2003, Jessica Peers, Asparagus Dreams, page 75:Pulling her leggings down over unshaven legs, she raptured "I'm dry!" to her audience.
• 2003, Beverly Adam, Irish Magic, page 121:They're called angora with wonderfully long, soft fleece,” she raptured on about her first venture.----