Word.ws English Dictionary

nunc stans

/ˌnʌŋkˈstænz/

nunc stans noun: eternal existence as an attribute of God.

Noun

nunc stans (uncountable)

  1. Eternal existence as an attribute of God.
    • But they will teach us that eternity is the standing still of the present time, a nunc-stans, as the schools call it; which neither they nor any else understand, no more than they would a hic-stans for an infinite greatness of place.1651, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
    • In other words, at the point where the infinite past and the infinite future collide into the present of a nunc stans they spark into existence, as it were, the mental phenomenon of a timeless present which overcomes all ordinary time constructions.2009, Patricia Bowen-Moore, Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Natality

Origin of nunc stans

Borrowed from Latin nunc (“now”) + stāns (“staying, remaining”).

Questions about nunc stans

What does nunc stans mean?
Nunc stans means eternal existence as an attribute of God.
What part of speech is nunc stans?
Nunc stans is a noun.
How do you pronounce nunc stans?
Nunc stans is pronounced /ˌnʌŋkˈstænz/.

Words near nunc stans in the dictionary

  1. nunbirds
  2. Nunburnholme
  3. Nunc
  4. Nunc dimittis
  5. nunc pro tunc
  6. nunc stans
  7. nuncatie
  8. nuncaties
  9. nunchaku
  10. nunchakus
  11. nuncheon

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nunc stans (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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Cite this entry: “nunc stans.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nunc_stans. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.