Welkins

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The vast and limitless skies that are often associated with celestial beauty
2. The lofty expanses above the world that evoke thoughts of the divine or transcendent
3. The wide and open expanse above the earth often seen as the dome of the sky

Etymology: Welkins is simply the plural of "welkin," and the singular is the older form, so the plural is the one that has survived in the sense "the open sky overhead." The interesting part is the singular's own history: in Old English, "wolcn" meant "cloud," and its plural "wolcnu" meant "sky" or "heavens." The plural form, in other words, was the one that drifted from cloud to heavens, and the singular was later rebuilt around that sense. That shift is the centrepiece. The word traces back to a Proto-Germanic root for "cloud," which is also the source of Dutch "wolk" and German "Wolke," both still meaning "cloud." English kept the same family of words but moved its main sense upward, so that a plural meaning "clouds" became a word for the whole vault of sky. In Middle English the form "welkne" covered weather, the heavens, and, earlier, cloud.

Synonyms: skies, heavens