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''hymn'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''hymn'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260124004559-00-⌔

hymn - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

hymn (plural hymns)

  • A song of praise or worship, especially a religious one.
    • ✤ But when the moon rose and the breeze awakened, and the sedges stirred, and the cat’s-paws raced across the moonlit ponds, and the far surf off Wonder Head intoned the hymn of the four winds, the trinity, earth and sky and water, became one thunderous symphony—a harmony of sound and colour silvered to a monochrome by the moon.1
    • ✤ An interesting feature of the church is the invisible clock, which you can hear thumping away as you enter. Constructed in 1525, it is one of the oldest timepieces in England. It chimes the hours and the quarters, and every three hours it plays a hymn. But it has no faces.2

Verb

hymn (third-person singular simple present hymns, present participle hymning, simple past and past participle hymned)

  • (ambitransitive) To sing a hymn.
    • ✤ An unknown cast, including Diane Keaton, hymned the Age of Aquarius, stripped off at the end of the first act and let the sunshine in at the end of the second.3
  • (transitive) To praise or extol in hymns.
    • ✤ To hymn the birth-night of the Lord.4
    • ✤ Their praise is hymned by loftier harps than mine.5
    • ✤ In sculpture and in the drama, in Aristophanic farce and in hieratic rituals, in pictorial art and in the stream of literature, the phallus is transcendent. Thus the Priapean poetry of the ancients, particularly of the Romans, hymned sexual potency.6

Etymology

From Middle English ymne, from Old English ymen (reinforced by Old French ymne), from Latin hymnus, borrowed from Ancient Greek ὕμνος (húmnos).

Pronunciation

  • enPR: hĭm, IPA: /hɪm/
  • Audio (US): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -ɪm
  • Homophone: him

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1907 August, Robert W[illiam] Chambers, chapter VIII, in The Younger Set, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, →OCLC: ↩

  2. 1980, AA Book of British Villages, Drive Publications Ltd, page 163: ↩

  3. 2009 January 21, Michael Coveney, “Tom O’Horgan”, in The Guardian ‎: ↩

  4. 1827, [John Keble], The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year, volume, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] [B] y W. Baxter, for J. Parker; and C[harles] and J[ohn] Rivington, […], →OCLC: ↩

  5. 1816, Lord Byron, “Canto III”, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Canto the Third, London: […] [F] or John Murray, […], →OCLC, stanza XXIX: ↩

  6. 1961, Harry E. Wedeck, Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs, New York: The Citadel Press, page iii: ↩

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Secondary

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