Celestial

How to spell celestial

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce celestial

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does celestial mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the sky, outer space, or the heavens.

Celestial in a sentence

• The observatory tracks the motion of distant celestial bodies.

• Early sailors used celestial navigation to chart their course by the stars.

Where does celestial come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin caelestis, meaning 'belonging to the sky or heaven', which was built on caelum, the Latin word for the sky or the vault of the heavens. English picked it up in the late 1300s by way of Old French celestial, at first in religious writing about the heavenly realm and divine beings. Over time it broadened to cover anything to do with the visible sky and the stars, so astronomers came to speak of celestial bodies and the celestial sphere. The same caelum root survives in the Italian word ceiling's cousins and in 'cerulean', the sky-blue colour. The spelling trap is that the Latin ae of caelum collapsed to a single e, so the word begins with a soft 'cel' rather than the 'sel' sound a writer might expect to spell with an s.

How the word is built

• celest- (from caelum: sky, heaven)
• -ial (adjective suffix: relating to)