kairos
Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word kairos. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word kairos, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say kairos in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word kairos you have here. The definition of the word kairos will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofkairos, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
English
Etymology
From Ancient Greek καιρός (kairós).
Pronunciation
Noun
kairos (plural kairoi)
- A time when conditions are right for the accomplishment of a crucial action; the opportune and decisive moment.
- Coordinate term: chronos
- 1968, Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Bantam, published 1997, →ISBN, page 114:
- The—so-called! friends—rational world. If only they, Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis, dear-but-square ones, could but know the kairos, the supreme moment…
- 1972, Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet (Crosswicks Journals), San Francisco: Harper & Row, →ISBN, page 245:
- Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively.
- 1980, Howard Alexander Slaatte, Time And Its End, Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, →ISBN, page 87:
- It is a confrontation and invasion of the eternal into the temporal, what Paul Tillich also refers to in the biblical term kairos as distinguished from chronos or common linear time. Kairos is time qualified by eternal relevance, time that is of significance to the Eternal because it is disturbed by and invested with the eternal.
