The Only Use of
sublime
in
Great Expectations
- As I passed the church, I felt (as I had felt during service in the morning) a sublime compassion for the poor creatures who were destined to go there, Sunday after Sunday, all their lives through, and to lie obscurely at last among the low green mounds.†
p. 155.7
Definitions:
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(1)
(sublime as in: she is sublime) impressively wonderful -- often beautiful or morally admirable
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(2)
(sublime as in: sublime ignorance) pure or extreme
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(3)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
More rarely, in chemistry or physics, sublime is used to indicate that something changes from a solid into a vapor without first melting; or vaporizes and then condenses right back again. That sense of the word is also often seen in the form sublimate.