Heaven
nounThe dwelling place of God and the blessed in religious belief, or by extension a state of supreme happiness or the sky above.
How to spell heaven
6 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce heaven
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does heaven mean?
- nounThe dwelling place of God and the blessed in religious belief, or by extension a state of supreme happiness or the sky above.
Heaven in a sentence
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Many faiths describe heaven as a place of perfect peace.
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After a long week, a quiet evening at home felt like heaven.
Where does heaven come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The word descends from the Old English heofon, which originally meant simply the visible sky or the firmament overhead, the dome of air and stars seen from the ground. It belongs to a Germanic family of words, with close cousins in the Old Saxon heban and related forms across the early Germanic languages, though scholars still debate the deeper root. As Christianity spread through Anglo-Saxon England, heofon took on its spiritual sense as the dwelling place of God and the blessed, sitting alongside its older meaning of the physical sky. Over the medieval centuries the spelling settled into the modern 'heaven', keeping the soft middle 'v' and the unstressed final 'en' that swallows its vowel. That weak ending is the small spelling trap: the word is pronounced as if it ends in a faint syllable, yet it is firmly written -ven, never -von.
How the word is built
- heofon (Old English root meaning sky/firmament)
- -en (vowel ending retained in modern spelling)
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