eternal

Pluraleternals

1. 1
   adjective

   Continuing forever, without ever coming to an end.

   The poem imagines an eternal kingdom that no empire could ever topple.

   Carved into the stone was a vow of eternal friendship between the two cities.

   Similareverlasting, endless, permanent, unending

   Oppositetransient, momentary, ephemeral

   Note

   The everyday sense, and the one that carried the word into English: Middle English eternal, from Old French, from Late Latin aeternālis and Latin aeternus, built on aevum, "age". It pushed out the native Old English ēċe. Endless and everlasting are its near neighbors. Sempiternal looks like a twin, but philosophers set it against the "outside time" meaning.

2. 2
   adjective

   Constant and unceasing; continually present without any pause.

   She had grown weary of his eternal complaints about the weather.

   The eternal hum of traffic drifted up to the apartment day and night.

   Similarconstant, endless, incessant, perpetual, ceaseless

   Oppositeoccasional, intermittent

   Note

   Hyperbole at work: nothing here lasts forever, it only seems never to stop. Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) sets Summerlee "behind his eternal pipe". That is the construction to imitate: a possessive, then eternal, then a habit or object the speaker finds wearing. The tone is wry, so keep it for things that grate or amuse, not for genuine permanence.

3. 3
   adjective

   Existing outside time itself, rather than within time but lasting everlastingly as the sempiternal does.

   Classical theologians describe God as eternal, wholly beyond the flow of time.

   For Plato, the Forms are eternal, unchanging and untouched by temporal succession.

   Similartimeless, atemporal

   Oppositetemporal

   Note

   A philosopher's distinction rather than a poet's. What is eternal here has no duration at all, because it stands wholly outside time and possesses its being without succession. The sempiternal, by contrast, endures through time without ever ending. Timeless and atemporal are the safer synonyms. When the contrast matters, as in writing about God or Plato's Forms, pair eternal with one of them so it is not read as merely "everlasting".

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A being who lives forever; an immortal.

   The novel's eternals had wandered the earth since before recorded history.

   Only an eternal could remember the world as it stood ten thousand years ago.

   Similarimmortal

   Oppositemortal

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