paradise

1. (chiefly religion) The place where sanctified souls are believed to live after death.Examples: "Living in paradise comes with a price."; "And Jesus said unto him [the malefactor], Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise."; "This employment I considered as the only satisfaction I could offer to the memory of your unfortunate mother, and I flatter myself that if she could look down, it would give her angelic mind pleasure even in paradise, to behold me instilling into the minds of her children, sentiments congenial with her own."Synonyms: Heavencountableuncountable

2. (Abrahamic religions) A garden where Adam and Eve first lived after being created.Examples: "Not that Adam that kept the Paradise but that Adam that keeps the prison:"; "Up into Heav’n from Paradise in hast Th’ Angelic Guards ascended,"; "Government like dress is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise."Synonyms: Garden of Edencountableuncountable

3. (figuratively) A very pleasant place, such as a place full of lush vegetation.Examples: "an island paradise in the Caribbean"; "Let me live here ever; So rare a wonder’d father and a wife Makes this place Paradise."; "The reader cannot but judge of the irksomeness of this situation to a mind like mine, in being daily exposed to new hardships and impositions, after having seen many better days, and been as it were, in a state of freedom and plenty; added to which, every part of the world I had hitherto been in, seemed to me a paradise in comparison of the West Indies."Synonyms: heavencountablefigurativelyuncountable

4. (figuratively) An ideal place for a specified type of person, activity, etc.Examples: "a shoppers’ paradise"; "And at this point, also, begins the pilot’s paradise: a wide river hence to New Orleans, abundance of water from shore to shore, and no bars, snags, sawyers, or wrecks in his road."; "But the idea that Singapore is a deregulated paradise is not borne out by reality, as anyone who has tried to dispose of a piece of used chewing gum there will know."countablefigurativelyuncountable

5. (figuratively) A very pleasant experience.Examples: "The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death."; "[…] sitting by him, roused from the nightmare of parting—called to the paradise of union—I thought only of the bliss given me to drink in so abundant a flow."; "He poured the last of the wine as Fanny, her face composed as she stroked his leg, after a paradise of expectation touched his aroused organ."countablefigurativelyuncountable

6. (architecture, obsolete) An open space within a monastery or adjoining a church, such as the space within a cloister, the open court before a basilica, etc.countableobsoleteuncountable