gods

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of god.

   The temple honored several gods at once.

   In many old myths, the gods controlled the weather and the seas.

   Note

   The regular -s plural, and it carries every sense of god with it, not only deities. It covers statues of them, idols people revere and powerful rulers, and informally it covers people of exceptional skill or striking good looks. The same spelling also names the theater's highest seats, a separate word that grew from the image of deities reigning from on high.

2. 2
   interjectionabbreviationellipsis

   Ellipsis of oh gods.

   Gods, I can't believe we actually won.

   We're going to be late again. Gods, every single time.

   Note

   An exclamation shortened twice over: oh my gods became oh gods, and then simply gods. It usually opens a sentence, set off by a comma, and pairs easily with a reply or a name. Gordon R. Dickson and Roland Green's Jamie the Red (1984) has "Gods, yes! I almost forgot." It suits speakers whose world holds many gods rather than one.

3. 3
   noun

   The topmost tier of seating in a theater or other auditorium.

   They climbed all the way to the gods to watch the opera.

   Tickets in the gods cost a fraction of those down in the stalls.

   Similargallery, balcony

   Oppositestalls

   Note

   A name taken from the sky: the seats sit so high that their occupants seem to look down on the stage the way gods reign from above. It is plural in form and comes with the, so people sit in the gods or climb up to them. The image also gave the gallery's audience its name.

4. 4
   nounplural

   The audience members who occupy the gallery, the highest seats in a theater.

   The gods roared their approval at the final curtain.

   Cheap tickets meant the gods were always the rowdiest part of the house.

   Similargallery

   Note

   The same high seats, now meaning the people in them: the upper gallery names a place, and this names its crowd. It is plural only and takes a plural verb, as in the gods were restless or the gods cheered, so it treats the audience as many people rather than one body.

5. 5
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of god.

   Note

   The present-tense form of a verb that always takes an object: something gods a person when it idolizes or deifies them. Because it is spelled exactly like the plural of the noun, only the grammar shows it is the verb. Look for a singular subject before it and an object after it.

6. 6
   nounhistoricalplural

   The blank metal spacing pieces, or quadrats, that printers tossed on the imposing stone in a motion like rolling dice.

   Bored apprentices flung the gods across the imposing stone between jobs.

   A printer scooped up the gods and let them clatter down like dice.

   Similarquadrats

   Note

   A word from the old composing room of hand-set type, where the imposing stone was the flat surface on which pages were assembled. It is historical, so it turns up in accounts of past printing shops rather than in modern ones. Like the theater crowd, it is always plural: printers threw the gods, never a single god.

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