Khiliast

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A person who holds the Christian belief that Christ will reign on earth for a thousand years
2. Someone who accepts the doctrine that Jesus will establish a thousand-year kingdom on earth
3. A believer in the prophetic teaching that Christ's reign will last for one thousand years

Etymology: Chapter 20 of the Book of Revelation describes Christ reigning on earth for a thousand years before the final judgment. The Greek "khilias," meaning "thousand," gave Christian writers a name for this belief. A "khiliastes" was a believer in the doctrine, and "khiliasmos" named the doctrine itself. English took the word directly from Greek, so it was borrowed rather than inherited through Latin or French. The same Greek numeral appears in much later English vocabulary. The prefix "kilo-," as in "kilogram" and "kilometre," comes from the same root, but it arrived through French as part of the metric system in the late 18th and 19th centuries. That makes the theological term far older than its modern cousins.