astral plane
astral plane noun: a supernatural plane of existence consisting of the world of the celestial spheres, propounded by esoteric philosophies, some religious teachings, and New Age thought.
Noun
astral plane (plural astral planes)
- A supernatural plane of existence consisting of the world of the celestial spheres, propounded by esoteric philosophies, some religious teachings, and New Age thought.
- Incidentally, such beings may be said to have an existence of a sort upon the lower astral plane; they are elementals created by man's evil desires and unclean thoughts.1936, Rollo Ahmed, The Black Art, London: Long, page 115
- The realm of the astral plane is an intermediate realm; below is the world of matter, above is the world of pure Being.1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 221
- Synonyms:
- astral world, desire world
- A Unicode plane (range of code points) above the Basic Multilingual Plane; any plane beyond U+FFFF.
- Emoji are in the astral plane.
- If your application works with MathML, or in various languages whose character sets gained support in Unicode 3.1 through the so-called Astral Planes, you will need to know that what Java calls a char is not really the same thing as a Unicode character or an XML character.2002, David Brownell, SAX2, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 110
Examples of astral plane in a sentence
- Two blocks of 16-bit values were set aside for use as special values for encoding astral plane characters.2002, Lars Marius Garshol, “Re: Stupid Unicode/UTF-16 Question”, in comp.text.xml (Usenet):
- UTF-16 encodes every character from O—65535 as 2 bytes; it then uses some dirty hacks if you actually need to represent the rarely used astral plane Unicode characters beyond 65535.2009, Mark Pilgrim, Dive Into Python 3, Apress, →ISBN, page 55:
- The astral planes include some such characters, notably in the CJK extensions, without which it is impossible to write some people's names correctly.2011, Tom Anderson, “Efficient unicode string implementation was: Re: Why No Supplemental Characters In Character Literals?”, in...
- Such characters are in the so-called “Astral Planes,” with a code point above U+FFFF.2011, David Hunter, Jeff Rafter, et al. (6 other authors), Beginning XML, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 134:
Synonyms of astral plane
- astral world
- desire world
Forms of astral plane
| plural | astral planes |
|---|
Questions about astral plane
- What does astral plane mean?
- Astral plane means a supernatural plane of existence consisting of the world of the celestial spheres, propounded by esoteric philosophies, some religious teachings, and New Age thought.
- How do you use astral plane in a sentence?
- Two blocks of 16-bit values were set aside for use as special values for encoding astral plane characters.
- What part of speech is astral plane?
- Astral plane is a noun.
- What is the plural of astral plane?
- The plural of astral plane is astral planes.
Words near astral plane in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: astral plane (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-astral plane.ogg.
Cite this entry: “astral plane.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/astral_plane. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.