All 5 Uses of
divine
in
Great Expectations
- My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door wide open, and finding an obstruction behind it, immediately divined the cause, and applied Tickler to its further investigation.†
Chpt 2divined = discovered
- I divined that my coming had stopped conversation in the room, and that its other occupants were looking at me.†
Chpt 11 *
- One day when I was busy with my books and Mr. Pocket, I received a note by the post, the mere outside of which threw me into a great flutter; for, though I had never seen the handwriting in which it was addressed, I divined whose hand it was.†
Chpt 32
- At Startop's suggestion, we put ourselves down for election into a club called The Finches of the Grove: the object of which institution I have never divined, if it were not that the members should dine expensively once a fortnight, to quarrel among themselves as much as possible after dinner, and to cause six waiters to get drunk on the stairs.†
Chpt 34
- It was a sort of vault on the ground floor at the back, with a despotic monster of a four-post bedstead in it, straddling over the whole place, putting one of his arbitrary legs into the fireplace and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner.†
Chpt 45 *
Definitions:
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(1)
(divine as in: to forgive is divine) wonderful; or god-like or coming from God
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(2)
(divine as in: divined from tea leaves) to predict or discover something supernaturally (as if by magic)
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(3)
(divine as in: divined through intuition) to discover or guess something -- usually through intuition or reflection
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(4)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) In the time of Shakespeare, divine was sometimes used as a noun to reference a priest or a person of the church. (To remember that sense, think of the clergyman as having come from God).
Divinity typically refers to a god or to a school of religion, but on rare occasions, it refers to the name of a kind of soft white candy. To remember that sense, you might think of it as tasting divine/wonderful.