Word of the Day
: January 14, 2025deus ex machina
playWhat It Means
A deus ex machina is a character or thing that suddenly enters the story in a novel, play, movie, etc., and solves a problem that had previously seemed impossible to solve.
// The introduction of a new love interest in the final act was the perfect deus ex machina for the main character's happy ending.
deus ex machina in Context
"The poultry thieves in Emma provide a particularly humorous example of deus ex machina: the arrival of a poultry thief into the surrounding area (on the penultimate page of the novel, no less) and his theft of Mrs. Weston’s turkeys frightens Mr. Woodhouse enough to consent to Emma’s marriage and to allow Mr. Knightley to move into Hartfield." — Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey, Jane Austen & the Price of Happiness, 2024
Did You Know?
The New Latin term deus ex machina is a translation of a Greek phrase and means literally "a god from a machine." Machine, in this case, refers to the crane (yes, crane) that held a god over the stage in ancient Greek and Roman drama. The practice of introducing a god at the end of a play to unravel and resolve the plot dates from at least the 5th century B.C.; Euripides (circa 484-406 B.C.) was one playwright who made frequent use of the device. Since the late 1600s, deus ex machina has been applied in English to unlikely saviors and improbable events in fiction or drama that bring order out of chaos in sudden and surprising ways.
Test Your Vocabulary with M-W Quizzes
Test Your Vocabulary
Rearrange the letters to form a word that comes from French and that means "the final outcome of the main dramatic complication in a novel, play, film, etc.": MEEDEUTNNO
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