prelapsarian
/pɹiːlapˈsɛːɹɪən/
prelapsarian adjective: of, or relating to the period of innocence before the Fall of man; innocent, unspoiled.
Adjective
prelapsarian (not comparable)
- Of, or relating to the period of innocence before the Fall of man; innocent, unspoiled.
- It is the prelapsarian Polynesia of free love, noble savagery, Kon Tiki rafting and Easter Island statuary, not the Levi’s-wearing, Toyota-driving, pédalo-pushing, efflorescent-cocktails-in-a-split-coconut-serving pseudo-paradise that awaits latter-day travellers.2001, Stephen Brown, Marketing – the Retro Revolution, London: SAGE Publications, →ISBN, page 139
- Ideally, individual stories and God's plan share the same final goal, namely, returning to a prelapsarian state of perfect communication with God.2004, Janet Bertsch, Storytelling in the works of Bunyan, Grimmelshausen, Defoe, and Schnabel, page 4
- Synonyms:
- antelapsarian, superlapsarian, halcyon
Examples of prelapsarian in a sentence
- Back in those ancient, prelapsarian days, "girl-on-girl" hadn’t even been invented yet.2006 April 10, George Saunders, “Nostalgia”, in The New Yorker, archived from the original on 17 Oct 2012:
- Conservative think-tanks have the same dream of return to a prelapsarian innocence.2010 September 23, “The perils of constitution-worship”, in The Economist:
Synonyms of prelapsarian
- antelapsarian
- superlapsarian
- halcyon
Antonyms
Forms of prelapsarian
| alternative form | pre-lapsarian |
|---|
Origin of prelapsarian
From pre- + Latin lapsus (“fall”) + -arian.
Questions about prelapsarian
- What does prelapsarian mean?
- Prelapsarian means of, or relating to the period of innocence before the Fall of man; innocent, unspoiled.
- How do you use prelapsarian in a sentence?
- Back in those ancient, prelapsarian days, "girl-on-girl" hadn’t even been invented yet.
- What part of speech is prelapsarian?
- Prelapsarian is an adjective.
- How do you pronounce prelapsarian?
- Prelapsarian is pronounced /pɹiːlapˈsɛːɹɪən/ (UK).
Words near prelapsarian in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: prelapsarian (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-prelapsarian.wav.
Cite this entry: “prelapsarian.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/prelapsarian. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.