rapture

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   a state of being carried away by overwhelming emotion

   listening to sweet music in a perfect rapture- Charles Dickens

2. 2
   noun

   Extreme pleasure, happiness or excitement.

   They went into raptures about the meal they'd had.

3. 3
   noun

   Alternative letter-case form of Rapture.

   In the last week, believers have linked Charlie Kirk’s assassination to the rapture theory: some on TikTok have suggested that Kirk, who in death became a martyr for Christian nationalists and whose memorial service veered into religious revival territory, could be resurrected during the rapture.

4. 4
   noun

   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.

   That 'gainst a rock, or flat, her keel did dash / With headlong rapture.

5. 5
   noun

   A spasm; a fit; a syncope; delirium.

   Your pratling nurse Into a rapture lets her baby cry

6. 6
   verb

   To cause to experience great happiness or excitement.

   She raptured me in summer by giving me Fitzgerald's flawed and gorgeous masterpiece, the book that held his tortured heart.

7. 7
   verb

   To take (someone) off the Earth and bring (them) to Heaven as part of the Rapture.

   "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 […]"

8. 8
   verb

   To state (something, transitive) or talk (intransitive) rapturously.

   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.

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle French rapture, from Latin raptūra, future active participle of rapiō (“snatch, carry off”).