glory

Etymology

From Middle English glory, glorie, from Old French glorie (“glory”), from Latin glōria (“glory, fame, renown, praise, ambition, boasting”). Doublet of gloria. Displaced native Old English wuldor.

noun

1. Great beauty and splendor.
   One of the hidden glories of Victorian engineering is proper drains. Isolating a city’s effluent and shipping it away in underground sewers has probably saved more lives than any medical procedure except vaccination. 2014-06-14, “It's a gas”, in The Economist, volume 411, number 8891
2. Honour, admiration, or distinction, accorded by common consent to a person or thing; high reputation; renown.
3. That quality in a person or thing which secures general praise or honour.
   Then he commenced to talk, really talk. and inside of two flaps of a herring's fin he had me mesmerized, like Eben Holt's boy at the town hall show. He talked about the ills of humanity, and the glories of health and Nature and service and land knows what all. 1913, Joseph C. Lincoln, chapter 4, in Mr. Pratt's Patients
4. Worship or praise.
5. (meteorology, optics) An optical phenomenon, consisting of concentric rings and somewhat similar to a rainbow, caused by sunlight or moonlight interacting with the water droplets that compose mist or clouds, centered on the antisolar or antilunar point.
6. Victory; success.
   But, with United fans in celebratory mood as it appeared their team might snatch glory, they faced an anxious wait as City equalised in stoppage time. May 13, 2012, Alistair Magowan, “Sunderland 0-1 Man Utd”, in BBC Sport
7. An emanation of light supposed to shine from beings that are specially holy. It is represented in art by rays of gold, or the like, proceeding from the head or body, or by a disk, or a mere line.
8. (theology) The manifestation of the presence of God as perceived by humans in Abrahamic religions.
9. (obsolete) Pride; boastfulness; arrogance.
   […] But if thou declare The Secrets, truth; and art so mad to dare (In glory of thy fortunes) to approue, That rich-crownd Venus, mixt with thee in loue; Ioue (fir’d with my aspersion, so dispred) Will, with a wreakefull lightning, dart thee dead. c. 1624, “A Hymne to Venus”, in George Chapman, transl., The Crowne of all Homers Workes Batrachomyomachia or the Battaile of Frogs and Mise, His Hymn’s and Epigrams, London: John Bill, page 106

verb

1. To exult with joy; to rejoice.
   In what the Apostle did glory?—He gloried in a Cross. ... [T]o the Ear of a Galatian, it conveyed much the same Meaning, as if the Apostle had gloried in a Halter; gloried in the Gallows; gloried in a Gibbet. 1753, James Hervey, A Visitation Sermon: Preached at Northampton, May 10, 1753
   He says he glories in what happened, and that good may be done indirectly; but I wish he would not so wear himself out now he is getting old, and would leave such pigs to their wallowing. 1891, Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles
   When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in, provided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its victory. 1902, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures 4 & 5
2. To boast; to be proud.
   For if in anything I have gloried to him on your behalf, I was not put to shame; but as we spake all things to you in truth, so our glorying also, which I made before Titus, was found to be truth. 1881, Revised Version, 2 Corinthians 7:14
3. (archaic, poetic) To shine radiantly.
   Down in a casement sat, A low sea-sunset glorying round her hair 1859–85, Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King, "The Last Tournament"