divination
noun
Simple meaning
The apparent art of discovering secrets or the future by preternatural means.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
dihvuhnayshuhnSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
dɪvəˈneɪʃən
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
The apparent art of discovering secrets or the future by preternatural means.
uncountable
The act of divining; a foreseeing or foretelling of future events.
countable
An indication of what is to come in the future or what is secret; a prediction.
The art or gift of prophecy (or the pretense of prophecy) by supernatural means
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B2 · Upper Intermediate (estimated)
- Frequency
- Uncommon
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: The apparent art of discovering secrets or the future by preternatural means.
Used this way, divination is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Nearby words
- fortune telling , rarer, so it draws attention
- soothsaying , rarer, so it draws attention
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
Any supernatural being worshipped as controlling some part of the world or some aspect of life or who is the personification of a force.
By divine means.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
A pseudoscience claiming divination by the positions of the planets and sun and moon.
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Synonyms
Sense: apparent art of discovering secrets
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.