Incarnation
name, noun ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 An incarnate being or form. countable, uncountable
"She is a new incarnation of some of the illustrious dead."
- 2 the act of attributing human characteristics to abstract ideas etc. wordnet
- 3 A version or iteration (of something). countable, uncountable
"It seems that they existed in some sort of previous incarnation of our universe, and use abstract terms to describe their existence, such as "feeding on concepts". They prepared for some sort of ascension, but then the Pattern came, which they describe at first as an all-consuming emptiness, elaborating by saying that anything that passed into it was torn asunder, subjected to a set of principles and order that grinds things down to nothing, in a process of which entropy is just one part."
- 4 (Christianity) the Christian doctrine of the union of God and man in the person of Jesus Christ wordnet
- 5 A living being embodying a deity or spirit. countable, uncountable
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- 6 a new personification of a familiar idea wordnet
- 7 An assumption of human form or nature. countable, uncountable
- 8 time passed in a particular bodily form wordnet
- 9 A person or thing regarded as embodying or exhibiting some quality, idea, or the like. countable, uncountable
"The leading dancer is the incarnation of grace."
- 10 The act of incarnating. countable, uncountable
- 11 The state of being incarnated. countable, uncountable
- 12 A rosy or red colour; flesh (the colour); carnation. countable, obsolete, uncountable
- 13 The process of healing wounds and filling the part with new flesh; granulation. countable, obsolete, uncountable
- 1 The doctrine that the second person of the Trinity assumed human form in the person of Jesus Christ and is fully divine and fully human.
Example
More examples"About two centuries after the formation of the first World State, the President of the World declared that the time was ripe for a formal union of science and religion, and called a conference of the leaders of these two great disciplines. Upon that island in the Pacific which had become the Mecca of cosmopolitan sentiment, and was by now one vast many-storied, and cloud-capped Temple of Peace, the heads of Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, the Regenerate Christian Brotherhood and the Modern Catholic Church in South America, agreed that their differences were but differences of expression. One and all were worshippers of the Divine Energy, whether expressed in activity, or in tense stillness. One and all recognized the saintly Discoverer as either the last and greatest of the prophets or an actual incarnation of divine Movement. And these two concepts were easily shown, in the light of modern science, to be identical."
Etymology
From Middle English incarnacion, borrowed from Old French incarnacion, from Medieval Latin, Ecclesiastical Latin incarnatio, from Late Latin incarnari (“to be made flesh”).
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.