EDIFYING • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Edifying

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/ˈɛdəfˌaɪɪŋ/ Listen

verb

Edify v. i. (past & past part. edified; pres. part. edifying)

To build; to construct. (Archaic) "There was a holy chapel edified."

To instruct and improve, especially in moral and religious knowledge; to teach. "It does not appear probable that our dispute (about miracles) would either edify or enlighten the public."

To teach or persuade. (Obs.)

Edify v. i. To improve. (R.)

adjective

Edifying adj. Instructing; improving; as, an edifying conversation.

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Etymology of 'Edifying'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Edifying" Quotes from Famous Books

... prices will rise and credit shorten; and the poor painter must fare farther on and find another hamlet. "Not here, O Apollo!" will become his song. Thus Trouville and, the other day, St. Raphael were lost to the arts. Curious and not always edifying are the shifts that the French student uses to defend his lair; like the cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken the waters of his chosen pool; but at such a time and for so practical a purpose Mrs. Grundy must allow ...

— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... administration of the Lord's Supper. As it is not customary with your Reverences to administer it in the evening, we thought, after conference with our Reverend Brethren of the New Amsterdam congregation, and mature deliberation, that it would be more edifying to preach at the Bouwery, on such occasions, in the morning, and then have the Communion, after the ...

— Narrative of New Netherland • J. F. Jameson, Editor

... was laid out, as a body might say, at five weeks old. She tells me they traced the stone, out of feelin' like, and followed it up until they fairly found it, set down as the head-stone of an elderly single lady, with a most pious and edifying inscription on it. Mother says it contains a whole varse from the bible! That stone may yet stand me in hand, for anything I know to ...

— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper

... nature is robbed of its force, and the necessity is exalted to a work of freedom, to an ethical law. The transient and negative nature of all things is transformed in the State into an expression of the ethical will. War, often painted by edifying speech as a state in which the vanity of temporal things is demonstrated, now becomes an element whereby the ideal character of the particular receives its right and reality. War has the deep meaning that by it the ethical health of the nations is preserved ...

— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... age of the Medicis, when refined courts of Italy were so greatly delighted at the recovery of the least edifying literary monuments of classical antiquity, allegorical interpretation had probably so often become but a cloak for licentiousness in poetry that it was becoming discredited. At any rate, Loyola rejected allegorical interpretation of ...

— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark

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