62 Words to Describe a God

The striking thing about this vocabulary is how much of it is built out of negatives. 15 of the 62 words below say what a god is not, or cannot be: not knowable, not changeable, not created, not subject to death, not able to be got to the bottom of. That is not English running short of adjectives — it is a deliberate method. Theologians call it the negative or apophatic way, and it is recognised across religious traditions: the claim is that no positive statement will be adequate, so description proceeds by ruling things out instead.

This page gives 62 words to describe a god, grouped by the idea each is reaching for. It is a page about the vocabulary rather than about any particular faith, and the glosses describe what each word claims rather than settling whether the claim is true. These words appear across religious traditions, in translations of scripture, in hymns, and in a good deal of poetry that is not religious at all.

Several carry an older sense alongside a current one, and reading only the modern sense produces sentences that say the opposite of what was meant. Awesome, terrible and dread are the three that catch people out, and the confusion table at the end deals with them.

All 62 words at a glance

ageless, almighty, august, awesome, beneficent, benevolent, bountiful, compassionate, divine, dread, enduring, eternal, everlasting, exalted, faithful, fearsome, forgiving, glorious, gracious, hallowed, hidden, holy, immanent, immortal, immutable, incomprehensible, ineffable, infinite, inscrutable, invincible, jealous, just, long-suffering, loving, majestic, merciful, mighty, mysterious, numinous, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, patient, peerless, primordial, righteous, sacred, sovereign, steadfast, supreme, tender, terrible, timeless, transcendent, unassailable, uncreated, unfailing, unfathomable, unknowable, veiled, venerable, wrathful

Power, rank and reach

The omni- words are the technical core, and they are 3 separate claims rather than one idea with three spellings: power, knowledge and presence. They share the prefix omni-, from Latin omnis, all; what differs is the second element in each. Philosophers argue them separately because each can be defended, or attacked, on its own.

Beyond knowing

5 of these 11 are outright negatives, and the rest circle the same difficulty. Two are the classic opposed pair: transcendent says a god stands outside the created world, immanent that it is present within it. Traditions differ over which to emphasise and many hold both at once, so treat them as two claims rather than a fork in the road.

Goodness and mercy

The warmest section, and the least specialised — nearly every word here is used of people too. Gracious and merciful are worth separating, because in most theological usage they name different acts: mercy withholds a punishment held to be deserved, grace gives a good thing held not to be earned.

Holiness, awe and judgement

The section where the language has moved furthest. Awesome, terrible and dread all still carry their older awe-related senses in the dictionary, but each has acquired a plainer modern one that now arrives first — wonderful, very bad, and frightening. In older and formal writing it is the earlier sense that is meant.

Constancy and origin

Time words, and finer than they look. Everlasting means going on forever, which is a claim about duration. Timeless and, in strict theological use, eternal make a different claim: standing outside time altogether rather than lasting through it. Uncreated and primordial are about where something came from rather than how long it goes on.

The ten that do the most work

1. ineffable — the strongest of the negatives: not merely hard to describe but not sayable at all
2. transcendent — standing beyond the created world, and the claim modern writers make most often
3. immanent — the other half of that pair, and one letter from imminent, which means about to happen
4. gracious — gives what was never earned, which no other word on this page quite says
5. sovereign — answerable to nothing above — a claim about authority rather than about strength
6. numinous — for the felt sense of the holy rather than the thing itself, which is why it describes an encounter as much as a god
7. steadfast — the plainest word for constancy, and the one that sounds least like a doctrine
8. hallowed — made holy and treated as such, and one of the few words here still current in ordinary English
9. long-suffering — enduring provocation without retaliating, which the gentler mercy words leave out
10. unfathomable — depth rather than distance, which is a different unknowing from unknowable

Words people get wrong

Related guides

• Adjectives for faith — the believer’s side of the same vocabulary.
• Adjectives for Jesus — a narrower subject set, where these words are applied to one figure.
• Adjectives for said — useful for scripture and hymn quotation, where the reporting verb carries weight.
• Adjectives for waterfalls — for majestic, glorious and the vocabulary of natural awe.
• Adjectives that start with I — the letter supplying most of the negatives above.
• Adjectives for integrity — where faithful, just and steadfast are used of people.

Checked against Merriam-Webster, the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook. Spotted an error? Tell us — see our editorial policy.