Ethereal

How to spell ethereal

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce ethereal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ethereal mean?

1. adjectiveSo light, delicate, or refined that it seems to belong to a world beyond the ordinary physical one.

Ethereal in a sentence

• The soprano's ethereal voice seemed to float above the orchestra.

• Morning mist gave the valley an ethereal quality in the photographs.

Where does ethereal come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word travels back to the Greek aither, the name for the bright upper air thought to lie above the ordinary atmosphere, the clear region where the gods and stars were believed to dwell. The Greeks built the adjective aitherios on it, meaning 'of the upper air' or 'heavenly', and Latin took this up as aethereus. English adopted the form 'ethereal' in the late 1500s, at first quite literally for the heavens and the celestial spheres, and then increasingly for anything so light, delicate, or refined that it seemed to belong to a higher and less material world. The same aither root gave us 'ether', both the imagined fifth element of old physics and, much later, the volatile chemical liquid. The spelling trap lives in two places: the silent stretch of 'eth' followed by the 'ere', and the unstressed '-eal' ending, which sounds like a plain '-ial' but is not spelled that way.

How the word is built

• ether (from Greek aither: the upper, purer air; the heavens)
• -eal (adjective-forming suffix)