bless

verb

ˈbles How to pronounce bless (audio)
Definition of blessnext
1
as in to consecrate
to make holy through prayers or ritual the priest blessed the water, thus allowing it to be used as holy water for various rites

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Antonyms & Near Antonyms
2
as in to celebrate
to proclaim the glory of bless the name of God

Synonyms & Similar Words

Antonyms & Near Antonyms
3
as in to gift
to furnish freely or naturally with some power, quality, or attribute blessed with a knack for glib conversation

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Antonyms & Near Antonyms

Example Sentences

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Recent Examples of bless Jon asks, suggesting a name and/or laying the groundwork for his priest father to come and bless the child. — David Ehrlich, IndieWire, 31 July 2026 Furthermore, he is blessed with excellent diplomats who cover his iron fist with an urbane, English-speaking velvet glove. — Literary Hub, 30 July 2026 One of her most significant feats was leading a team of artists over the course of a decade to illustrate a massive New Testament Bible written by hand in the Old Georgian language — an endeavor blessed by the Georgian Patriarch himself. — The Editors Of Artnews, ARTnews.com, 28 July 2026 Shein decamped to London, where Britain's regulator approved the listing but the CSRC, China's securities regulator, never blessed it. — Drew Bernstein, Forbes.com, 28 July 2026 See All Example Sentences for bless
Recent Examples of Synonyms for bless
  1. consecrate
  2. celebrate
  3. gift
  4. dedicate
  5. praise
  6. endow
  7. sanctify
  8. hallow
Verb
  • Still, there were only eight African Anglican clergy in Kenya by 1920, and the first Kenyan bishops would not be consecrated until 1955.
    — Stephanie TriplettAll, Encyclopedia Britannica, 7 Aug. 2026
  • The Vatican declared the group of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide in schism after the SSPX consecrated four bishops in Switzerland without Pope Leo XIV’s approval this month.
    — Nora O'Neill, Charlotte Observer, 15 July 2026
Definition of consecrate
Verb
  • The Duke and Duchess of Sussex supported their friend David Foster at his event celebrating 40 years of fundraising for the David Foster Foundation.
    — Stephanie Petit, PEOPLE, 8 Aug. 2026
  • Heming Willis told Kotb that her husband's condition initially left her feeling guilty about celebrating her recent 50th birthday.
    — Charlie Carballo, USA Today, 8 Aug. 2026
Definition of celebrate
Verb
  • Every traveler has a favorite way of collecting memories—and mine began with a Canon AE-1, the camera my grandmother gifted me for a graduation gift many years back.
    — Jessica Chapel, Condé Nast Traveler, 7 Aug. 2026
  • Qatar gifted the Boeing 747 luxury jet to the Pentagon in 2025, and it was converted for use as the new Air Force One, after Boeing’s work to build a similar new aircraft for the government faced costly delays.
    — Emily Hallas, The Washington Examiner, 6 Aug. 2026
Definition of gift
Verb
  • His family foundation, one of the Bay Area’s largest, has dedicated more than $1 billion to nonprofits and advocacy groups in the region since 2020, according to a Bloomberg calculation based on public documents.
    — Bloomberg, Mercury News, 5 Aug. 2026
  • Growing up in a very pro-Israel home guided me toward dedicating my life to educating kids and adults about Israel and the importance of supporting its various institutions.
    — Roni Raab, Sun Sentinel, 5 Aug. 2026
Definition of dedicate
Verb
  • Their videos work as a modern take on the narcocorridos – ballads about the trafficking underworld that drug kingpins used to praise themselves and communicate with each other, said security expert Alexei Chévez.
    — Rey Rodríguez, CNN Money, 8 Aug. 2026
  • The state Korean Central News Agency on Wednesday also praised samgyetang, a chicken soup stuffed with ginseng, glutinous rice and jujubes, reporting that Pyongyang restaurants were attracting customers seeking relief from the heat.
    — Reuters, NBC news, 7 Aug. 2026
Definition of praise
Verb
  • Seeing an old bulky PC with a PC-DOS command line OS takes those of us of a certain age back to the heady days when computers were exciting and new, even though they had not yet been endowed with the eerie cognitive powers of LLMs.
    — John Werner, Forbes.com, 29 July 2026
  • But they’re endowed with a fundamentally different intelligence, one shaped by a separate evolutionary path and defined by a nervous system that’s distributed throughout their bodies rather than centralized like that of the brains of most animals.
    — Cody Cottier, Scientific American, 29 July 2026
Definition of endow
Verb
  • To say that the Union was sacred and the touchstone of democracy was to strengthen slavery by sanctifying the state that protected it.
    — Dominic Erdozain, Time, 3 July 2026
  • The cruelest dimension of this is that a Christianity hijacked by the evangelical right now seeks to sanctify that mythology in the name of God.
    — Otis Moss III, Chicago Tribune, 28 June 2026
Definition of sanctify
Verb
  • Yet, these grounds were hallowed to the African American community.
    — Chip Colwell, The Conversation, 22 Oct. 2025
  • In a new political environment in which none of the new leaders could claim to be revolutionary founding fathers, Deng’s blessing hallowed Jiang and Hu and helped ensure that each survived the vicissitudes of succession politics.
    — Jonathan A. Czin, Foreign Affairs, 21 Oct. 2025
Definition of hallow

Browse Nearby Words

blend (with)
bless
blessed
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Cite this Entry

“Bless.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/bless. Accessed 11 Aug. 2026.

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