Word.ws English Dictionary

momentary god

momentary god noun: a specific phenomenon, such as a lightning bolt, interpreted and experienced as a deity.

Noun

momentary god (plural momentary gods)

  1. A specific phenomenon, such as a lightning bolt, interpreted and experienced as a deity.
    • Concentrating his attention on the conception of lightning, Usener discovers a transition in the way lightning is conceived: initially experienced as an exclamation in response to a "momentary god"—Zeus originally meant "he who thunders"—[…]2018 August 6, Karen Lang, Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History, Cornell University Press, →ISBN, page 96

Forms of momentary god

pluralmomentary gods

Origin of momentary god

Calque of German Augenblicksgott, coined by Hermann Usener in his Götternamen in 1896.

Questions about momentary god

What does momentary god mean?
Momentary god means a specific phenomenon, such as a lightning bolt, interpreted and experienced as a deity.
What part of speech is momentary god?
Momentary god is a noun.
What is the plural of momentary god?
The plural of momentary god is momentary gods.

Words near momentary god in the dictionary

  1. momentany
  2. momentarily
  3. momentariness
  4. momentarinesses
  5. momentary
  6. momentary god
  7. momentary gods
  8. momentasone
  9. momentful
  10. momentfuls
  11. momentless

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: momentary god (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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