bless
- 01 B1 Intermediate
v.to make something holy or ask for God's protection and help.
v.to consecrate or make holy by religious rite; to invoke divine favour upon a person or object.
Simple“The priest will bless the new house and the family living there.”
In context“During the ceremony, the bishop will bless the congregation, invoking peace and prosperity for the coming year.”
- 02 B2 Upper Intermediate
v.to give your official approval or support to a plan or idea.
v.to grant approval, assent, or support to a proposal or undertaking.
Simple“The manager decided to bless the project after seeing the final budget.”
In context“The board of directors finally chose to bless the merger, provided that the current management team remained in place for the transition.”
- 03 C1 Advanced
v.to turn a piece of data into a specific type of object in certain computer languages.
v.to associate a reference with a specific package or class, effectively turning it into an object. Transitive; specific to the Perl programming language.
Simple“In Perl, you use the bless function to create an object from a reference.”
In context“The constructor method must explicitly bless the hash reference into the class to enable method inheritance.”
UsageThe verb takes a reference as its primary object and an optional package name as the second argument.
Synonymsinstantiate - 04 B1 Intermediate
interj.a word you say when someone does something sweet, kind, or slightly silly.
interj.an exclamation used to express endearment, gratitude, or occasionally patronising sympathy.
Simple“He brought me a cup of tea without being asked—bless him.”
In context“She spent all afternoon baking these cookies for the charity sale, bless her heart.”
Teacher's tipOften used as 'Bless you' or 'Bless her'. Be aware that it can sound slightly condescending depending on the speaker's tone.
“The women sang with her, prayed for her and asked God to bless her with another child.”
From Middle English blessen, from Old English bletsian (“to consecrate (with blood)”), from Proto-West Germanic blōdisōn (“to sprinkle, mark or hallow with blood”), from Proto-Germanic blōþą (“blood”), of uncertain origin, possibly from Proto-Indo-European *bʰleh₃- (“to bloom”). Cognate with Old Norse bleza (“to bless”) (whence Icelandic blessa), Old English blēdan (“to bleed”). More at bleed.
An ellipsis for an expression such as bless your heart.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.