Word.ws English Dictionary

uranian

Syllables: Ura·ni·an/jʊˈɹeɪnɪən/US/jʊˈɹeɪniən/

uranian adjective: containing hexavalent uranium. Also the alternative letter-case form of Uranian.

Adjective (1)

uranian (not comparable)

  1. Containing hexavalent uranium.

Adjective (2) capitalized: Uranian

Uranian (comparative more Uranian, superlative most Uranian)

  1. (comparable, literary, poetic) Celestial, heavenly; uranic.
    • Hence is that secret pardon we bestow / In the true instinct of the grateful heart, / Upon the Sons of Song. The good they do / In the clear world of their Uranian art / Endures for ever; while the evil done / In the poor drama of the mortal scene, / Is but a passing cloud before the sun; [...]1853, Edward Bulwer[-]Lytton, “The Ideal World”, in The Poetical and Dramatic Works of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Bart., volume III, London: Chapman and Hall, […], →OCLC, stanza IV, page 317
    • Hail thou! sole Muse that, in an age of toil, / Of all the old Uranian sisterhood, / Art left to light us o'er the furrowed soil, / Of this laborious star!1859, Owen Meredith [pseudonym; Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton], “Epilogue”, in The Wanderer, London: Chapman & Hall, […], →OCLC, part III, stanza I, page 424
  2. (archaic, comparable, literary) Homosexual; also, pederastic; relating to a man's erotic love for adolescent boys; (specifically) of poetry: conveying appreciation for young men.
    • To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble – more noble than other forms.1898 February 18?, Oscar Wilde, “Letter to Robert Ross”, in Merlin Holland, Rupert Hart-Davis, editors, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, published 2000...
    • His [Plato's] Philosophical Eros is not the Uranian Eros which possessed the nation, and the Uranian doctrine is not primarily either philosophical or paederastic. It is a value attached to the masculine which included philosophy as masculine and paederasty when not anti-masculine, but was itself...1930, Arthur Lyon Raile [pseudonym; Edward Perry Warren], “The Uranian Idea”, in A Defence of Uranian Love, part the second (The Uranian Eros), [London]: Privately printed, →OCLC, pages 19–20
  3. (Greek, Roman, not comparable) Of Aphrodite Urania, the heavenly aspect of the Greek goddess of beauty and love Aphrodite and her Roman counterpart Venus, as contrasted with the earthly aspect known as Aphrodite Pandemos: heavenly, spiritual.
    • For assuredly are there two Venuses; one, the eldest, the daughter of Uranus, born without a mother, whom we call the Uranian; the other younger, the daughter of Jupiter and Dione, whom we call the Pandemian;—of necessity must there also be two Loves, the Uranian and Pandemian companions of these...a. 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Banquet. Translated from Plato.”, in Mrs. Shelley [i.e., Mary Shelley], editor, Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, … In Two Volumes, volume...
    • That this is indeed the general tendency of his [Pausanias of Athens'] speech is made clear by two remarks that follow immediately upon his differentiating the Pandemian from the Uranian gods. [...] But what is true for Aphrodite seems to be a contradiction in terms: she is both one and two and all...2010, Steven Berg, “Pausanias: Noble Lies and the Fulfillment of Greekness”, in Eros and the Intoxications of Enlightenment: On Plato’s Symposium (SUNY Series in Ancient Greek Philosophy), Albany...
    Antonyms:
    pandemian, Pandemic
  4. (Greek, dated, not comparable) Relating to Urania, the Muse of astronomy.
    • Graced by nurses (art's nurse highly grac'd him) / Who fed him with pure marrow of the Muses; / And when he list, with moisture to refresh him, / He drunke cleare Helicon: cleare from abuses, / He bent his mind to pure Vranian vses, / Vranianie him did to heau'n vpreare: / And made to man, him...1600, Cyril Tourneur, The Transformed Metamorphosis, [London]: Printed by Valentine Sims, […], →OCLC; republished in John Churton Collins, editor, The Plays and Poems of Cyril Tourneur: […] In Two...
    • Actually, this little girl-child should have been as happy as a lark. But, she wasn't. This is because her Bengali genes had her continually wish to be a Sarasvati, or Uranian Muse, to all the males who came within her ambit – incessantly inspiring them to great works of Art or Scientific...2007, Vivek Iyer, chapter 8, in Samlee’s Daughter: A Novel, Great Britain: Polyglot Publications, →ISBN, section I
  5. (broadly, historical, not comparable, rare) Of or pertaining to astronomy; astronomical.
    • Mr. [William] Crabtree, whom Horrox [i.e., Jeremiah Horrocks] had, by letter, invited to this Uranian banquet, and who, in mathematical knowledge, was inferior to few, very readily complied with his friend's requeſt, and intended to obſerve the tranſit [of Venus] in the ſame manner with Horrox; but...1761, “Astrophilus” [pseudonym], “An Account of Mr. Horrox’s Observations of the Transit of Venus over the Sun, in the Year 1639”, in Edmund Burke, editor, The Annual Register, or A View of the...
    • When, as previously mentioned, I first learned of and thought about the favorable circumstance of this conjunction, I immediately wrote to my most esteemed associate in astronomy, W[illiam] Crabtree, a man who has few superiors in the mathematical sciences. I did not doubt that a few very attentive...2012, Jeremiah Horrocks, “What Others Observed or could have Observed of This Conjunction”, in Wilbur Applebaum, transl., Venus Seen on the Sun: The First Observation of a Transit of Venus …...
    Synonyms:
    uranical

Noun (1) capitalized: Uranian

Uranian (plural Uranians)

  1. (archaic, literary) A male homosexual; also, a pederast; a man engaged in an erotic relationship with an adolescent boy.
    • Doubtless music is pre-eminently the Uranian’s art. His emotional nature goes out to it and in it, as in no other.[1908], Xavier Mayne [pseudonym; Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson], The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life, [Rome?]: Privately printed, →OCLC, page 395
    • [Edward] Carpenter saw the Uranian (homosexual) spirit to be more enlightened than that of the common man and believed that Uranians were the new prophets of the coming social revolution.2003, Chuck Stewart, “Biographical Sketches”, in Gay and Lesbian Issues: A Reference Handbook (Contemporary World Issues), Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, →ISBN, page 138
    Synonyms:
    uranist, urning

Adjective (3) capitalized: Uranian

Uranian (not comparable)

  1. Of or pertaining to the planet Uranus.
    • The Uranian year is equal to 84 terrestrial years, or 30687 terrestrial days; and the Uranian day, according to the probable estimate, being shorter than the terrestrial day in the ratio of 1 to 2⁵²⁶⁄₁₀₀₀, it follows that the Uranian year consists of 77336 Uranian days.1854, “The Planets: Are They Inhabited Worlds?”, in Dionysius Lardner, editor, The Museum of Science & Art, volume I, number 6, London: Walton and Maberly, […], →OCLC, chapter III, paragraph 8, page...
    • The inclination of the plane of Uranus's equator to the path in which he travels being about 76°, it follows that the Uranian sun has a range of about 76° on either side of the celestial equator, during the long Uranian year.1872, Richard A[nthony] Proctor, “Uranus and Neptune, the Arctic Planets”, in Other Worlds than Ours: The Plurality of Worlds Studied under the Light of Recent Scientific Researches, 3rd edition...

Noun (2) capitalized: Uranian

Uranian (plural Uranians)

  1. An inhabitant of the planet Uranus.
    • [T]he fury of a fiery hot-brained Marsian, may kindle immediate and incessant wrangling and feuds; whilst a quiet placid Uranian, in his turn, may yet at times be excessively annoyed, ay, worried and tormented, by the tardiness, listlessness and inactivity of his dronish companion.1839, A Fantastical Excursion into the Planets, London: Saunders and Otley, […], →OCLC, page 172
    • And obviously, since the year of the Uranians lasts 84 of our years, the continuance of the sun above the horizon would last for many years. [...] And as with the summer day, so with the winter night, years elapse before either comes to an end. For upwards of 20 years, in a latitude corresponding...1872, Richard A[nthony] Proctor, “Uranus and Neptune, the Arctic Planets”, in Other Worlds than Ours: The Plurality of Worlds Studied under the Light of Recent Scientific Researches, 3rd edition...

Also used as

uranian is also the alternative letter-case form of Uranian.

Synonyms of uranian

1 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Antonyms

Forms of uranian

Adjective
comparativemore Uranian
superlativemost Uranian
alternative formOuranian
alternative formouranian
alternative formuranian
Noun
pluralUranians

Origin of uranian

From Latin Ūrania (“muse of astronomy in Greek mythology”) + -an (suffix forming agent nouns). Ūrania is derived from Ancient Greek Οὐρᾰνῐ́ᾱ (Ourănĭ́ā, “muse of astronomy”), from οὐράνιος (ouránios, “of or relating to the sky, celestial, heavenly”) (from οὐρανός (ouranós, “the sky; heaven, home of the gods; the universe”), probably ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₁wers- (“rain”)) + -ιος (-ios, suffix forming adjectives meaning ‘pertaining to’). The alternative form Ouranian is derived from Ancient Greek οὐράνιος (ouránios). Adjective sense 2 (“homosexual”) and the noun sense (“a homosexual”) refer to Plato’s work Symposium (c. 385–370 B.C.E.), where the goddess Aphrodite, in her heavenly aspect Aphrodite Urania (see adjective sense 3) is described as inspiring a noble form of affection between older and younger men. Compare German Urning (“a homosexual, Uranian”), Urnigtum (“homosexuality”), also referring to Aphrodite Urania, coined by the German writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) in 1864. By the 1900s, the use of the word in this sense had largely been supplanted by homosexual (see further at that entry). The term is no longer mainstream and is almost never used in...

From Uranus + -ian.

Words that rhyme with uranian

12 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about uranian

What does uranian mean?
Uranian means containing hexavalent uranium.
What part of speech is uranian?
Uranian can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce uranian?
Uranian is pronounced /jʊˈɹeɪnɪən/ (UK).

Words near uranian in the dictionary

  1. Uranga
  2. Urangas
  3. Urangeline
  4. Urangeline East
  5. urania
  6. uranian
  7. Uranians
  8. uranias
  9. uranic
  10. Uranicentric
  11. uranid

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: uranian (page history and authors); Uranian (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-uk-Uranian.oga.

Cite this entry: “uranian.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/uranian. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.