Word.ws English Dictionary

Eostre

Eostre proper noun: a hypothesised West Germanic goddess, supposedly of the spring season, but of uncertain provenance.

Proper noun

Eostre

  1. A hypothesised West Germanic goddess, supposedly of the spring season, but of uncertain provenance.
    • There were also Nature deities, Hrede, the personification of the brightness of Summer, and Eostra, the radiant creature of the Dawn. It will be remembered that it was the worship, not of Balder, but of Eostra, which the Christian missionaries found so deeply imbedded that they adopted her name and...1922, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, The Old English Herbals, London: Longmans, Green and Co., page 3
  2. A neopagan festival celebrated either in March or April to welcome the Spring, also called Ostara or Easter.

Forms of Eostre

alternative formĒostre

Origin of Eostre

A learned borrowing from Old English Ēostre, the Northumbrian variant of West Saxon Ēastre (“a word referring to "the rising dawn" to indicate the season of Spring”) and ēastre (“Easter”), from Proto-West Germanic *Austrā, from Proto-Germanic *Austrǭ (“Easter, springtime”). Doublet of Easter.

Questions about Eostre

What does Eostre mean?
Eostre means a hypothesised West Germanic goddess, supposedly of the spring season, but of uncertain provenance.
What part of speech is Eostre?
Eostre is a proper noun.

Words near Eostre in the dictionary

  1. eosins
  2. eosophobia
  3. eosphorite
  4. eosphorites
  5. Eosphorus
  6. Eostre
  7. eosuchian
  8. EOT
  9. eotaxin
  10. eotaxins
  11. eoten

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Eostre (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.

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