destiny
Pluraldestinies
- 1The future state that a person or thing is destined for, settled in advance by divine power or human will and bound to come in time.
She was convinced that her destiny was to become a doctor, as her grandmother had foretold.
Raised as heir to the throne, the prince never questioned the destiny his father had chosen for him.
Similarfate, fortune, lot, kismet, doom
Note
Here destiny names where a life or a people ends up, not the power that sends them there. The word came through Old French from Latin dēstinō, the source of destine, and displaced the native Old English wyrd. A destiny can rest in someone's hands: Li Ung Bing, writing in 1914, leaves China's sole regent with the destiny of four hundred millions of human beings in hers.
- 2What finally happens to a person, whether or not it was bound to happen or decided in advance.
Voters in the region want to control their own destiny rather than leave it to distant officials.
The team's destiny now depends on how it plays in the last two games.
Note
This is the looser use: what becomes of someone, with no claim that it was written in advance. Because nothing is fixed, a person can shape it, and phrases like control your own destiny make sense here in a way they cannot in the predestined sense. With final in front, it can simply mean how things end: time to face your final destiny.
- 3The fixed order of things, thought of as an irresistible power that decides what will happen, either in general or to a particular person.
They met by chance on a train, but both of them swear it was destiny.
No one, the old tales say, can escape the hand of destiny.
Similarfate
Oppositechance
Note
Seen as a power, destiny behaves almost like a person: it acts, finds and decides, and it mostly goes without an article, as in destiny will find her other half. It can still be counted when rival orders of things compete, as when Philip Pullman's Northern Lights (1995) sets two futures, two destinies, against each other. Fate is its closest synonym here.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English destine (and related forms), from Old French destinee, from Latin dēstinō, the source of English destine. It displaced the Old English word wyrd.