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Glite Dictionary
Divine Comedy

Divine Comedy

2 8.4
A long poem by Dante Alighieri about a soul's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise
  • proper noun
  • /dɪˈvaɪn ˈkɒmədi/
  • Literature
translation icon : Divina Comedia
  • We are fortunate to be able to test this fashionable analysis because in the Divine Comedy, Dante records his own opinions and beliefs about a broad spectrum of topics, including morality, politics, and science.
  • Dante's Divine Comedy

But tell us a bit more about there's this concept of Mount Delectable that you have from Dante's Divine Comedy in the book.

Examples

  • The work, a monumental portal covered with sculptural relief representing Dante's Divine Comedy, was commissioned by the French government in 1880 to be delivered by 1885.

    Fiction book (2002)

  • Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy explores the journey of the soul through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

  • You ever read The Divine Comedy?

    The Bucket List (2007)

  • I picked up The Divine Comedy.

    Academic text (2007)

  • It's a translation of the divine comedy.

    In the Hand of Dante (2025)

  • The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri's journey into hell.

    The Bucket List (2007)

  • The title of Dante's poem took its standard title, The Divine Comedy, only in the mid-sixteenth century, with Ludovico Dolce's edition of 1555.

    Academic text (2012)

  • In Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, Brutus and Judas Iscariot were placed in the harshest section of Hell, even below Muhammad.

    Blog text (31)

  • In college, we studied the themes of love and redemption in Dante's Divine Comedy.

  • Many consider the Divine Comedy to be one of the greatest works of world literature.

Synonyms

Divina Commedia
vsDivine Comedy
  • Literature
9.9

A long poem by Dante Alighieri about a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise

focuses on the soul's journey rather than the poet's perspective

Surface Forms

Divine Comedy main

Morphology

divine + comedy

Although the constituents 'divine' and 'comedy' have clear literal senses, the phrase is a proper title for Dante's epic and uses an older literary sense of 'comedy' (a narrative with a particular structure), not a simply humorous religious play. A B1 learner who only knows the words would likely infer an incorrect literal meaning, so the actual referent and sense cannot be derived from the parts without cultural or literary knowledge.

Etymology

Divine Comedy is a long poem by Dante about a soul's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The word Divine means 'godly' and Comedy used to mean a story with a 'happy ending', so the title gives the image of moving from darkness to light and explains the poem's meaning today.