Words · Meanings · Passages
Traherne Lexicon
A Reader’s Companion to Centuries of Meditations
471 entries · 0 subsidiary termsEntries
73–108 of 471
Choice
Choice is the determination of a willing agent among possible courses or objects.
Centuries of Meditations
Christ
Christ names Jesus as the divinely appointed Saviour.
Centuries of Meditations
Christian
A Christian is a person related to Christ in faith and life.
Centuries of Meditations
Church
Church may name a building, the community of Christian believers, or the whole redeemed society across earthly and heavenly life.
Centuries of Meditations
City
A city is an inhabited civic place, with streets, houses, gates, and public life.
Centuries of Meditations
Clothing
Clothing is bodily covering and adornment.
Centuries of Meditations
Clue
A clue is originally a ball of thread; it can therefore be a guiding thread through a labyrinth.
Centuries of Meditations
Coin and money
Money is a conventional medium of exchange and a familiar measure of wealth.
Centuries of Meditations
Color
Colour is visible hue and, by transfer, an appearance or expressive quality.
Centuries of Meditations
Commandment
A commandment is a binding divine injunction.
Centuries of Meditations
Commodity
Commodity here means advantage, benefit, or profit.
Centuries of Meditations
Common things
Common things are widely available or shared and familiar.
Centuries of Meditations
Communication
To communicate is to impart or share.
Centuries of Meditations
Community and communion
Communion is a participation held with another, especially fellowship in a shared good.
Centuries of Meditations
Complacency
Complacency is pleased satisfaction in an object judged good.
Centuries of Meditations
Comprehensor
A comprehensor holds or apprehends things within understanding.
Centuries of Meditations
Conceit
A conceit is a conception or opinion held in the mind.
Centuries of Meditations
Concernment
Concernment means relevance, importance, or a matter that concerns someone.
Centuries of Meditations
Condescension
Condescension is the voluntary descent of one who is high toward someone low or needy.
Centuries of Meditations
Conscience
To make a conscience of something is to treat it as a matter of moral obligation and to take care to perform it rightly.
Centuries of Meditations
Consideration
Consideration is sustained attention that examines a thing's nature, relations, and worth.
Centuries of Meditations
Contemplation
Contemplation is sustained intellectual beholding of an object in its truth and value.
Centuries of Meditations
Contempt
To contemn is to despise, disregard as unworthy, or refuse to value.
Centuries of Meditations
Contentment
Contentment is a settled satisfaction in what one rightly possesses.
Centuries of Meditations
Conversation
Conversation can mean social intercourse, an ongoing way of life, or familiar dealing with something.
Centuries of Meditations
Conversion
Conversion is a turning toward a different spiritual orientation.
Centuries of Meditations
Copula and Hymenaeus
Copula is a bond or link.
Centuries of Meditations
Cordial
A cordial is something that strengthens or revives the heart, especially a restorative medicine.
Centuries of Meditations
Corn
Corn in this English usage means cereal grain, not specifically maize.
Centuries of Meditations
Corruption
Corruption is a spoiling of an originally good thing or a disordering of its powers and relations.
Centuries of Meditations
Counsel
Counsel is advice or deliberative judgment; in the plural it can name settled purposes or designs.
Centuries of Meditations
Country
Country may mean a foreign land or the countryside outside urban life.
Centuries of Meditations
Courage
Courage is firmness of soul in the face of threats, temptations, loss, or other people’s wrongdoing.
Centuries of Meditations
Covenant
A covenant is an ordered relation established by promise and obligation.
Centuries of Meditations
Cozenage
Cozenage means cheating, fraud, or dishonest dealing.
Centuries of Meditations
Creation
Creation names both God's making of beings and the resulting order of created things.
Centuries of Meditations
About this collection
October 2026
Centuries of Meditations · Thomas Traherne
About this collection and downloads
471 contextual articles from the complete Centuries of Meditations, with 410 numbered positions, including the editorial notice at II.88 and the unfinished Fifth Century ending at V.10.
A companion for reading
This lexicon accompanies Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditations in the Diotimos Editions annotated edition of 2026. Its 471 articles explain the book's characteristic words, recurrent images, scriptural figures and habits of argument. They range from everyday things, such as air, corn and water, to the governing ideas of felicity, enjoyment, love, infinity and possession. The scope is the complete work: four numbered Centuries followed by the unfinished Fifth. The numbering runs through 410 positions, but there are 409 actual meditations. At II.88 the Diotimos edition prints only an editorial notice: its explanatory note says that Traherne skipped that number, with no missing text. The Fifth Century ends at V.10.
Traherne repeatedly gives familiar words unfamiliar work. To enjoy is to enter into delighted possession; a want can disclose a capacity; a common thing can be a greater treasure than a rarity. These senses are best learned by returning to the passages where they operate. The lexicon therefore offers interpretation alongside lexical explanation. It does not replace continuous reading, and a cross-reference is an invitation to compare, not a claim that two words mean the same thing.
The articles are arranged alphabetically. Traherne wrote in English, so the line beneath each headword gives English forms and useful equivalents. Related forms and less prominent senses can be found through the lexical index. Longer articles make room for the distinctions that carry the argument; shorter ones explain a particular image, older usage or local difficulty.
How to read an entry
The word identifies the sense that matters here, including older uses that a modern reader might miss. In Traherne follows the word or idea through the Centuries. This is a reading of the cited passages, not a set of definitions attributed to Traherne. Some articles include additional named discussions where a central concept needs more space.
The places gives selected, annotated references. These are guides to fruitful reading, not exhaustive concordances. In this edition points out a lexical, spelling or editorial issue that affects interpretation. See also links to other articles. The source note attached to the forms line records the textual basis of the article. Headwords sometimes normalize an inflected form or name a clearly present idea; the article states the relation to the wording of the text.
Three indexes supplement the alphabetical sequence. The Lexical forms and aliases index helps readers find related English forms and expressions. The Passage index leads from a cited meditation to the articles that discuss it. The Thematic index groups connected readings without imposing a single system on the book. These indexes are linked in the digital editions.
References and textual conventions
References take the form I.3, meaning the First Century, meditation 3; V.10 is the last surviving meditation. Links lead to the corresponding meditation in the book. Century and meditation numbers remain the stable references across formats.
The underlying text is the Diotimos edition, which identifies Bertram Dobell's 1908 edition and its public-domain transcription as its copy-text and describes manuscript-based corrections. Its introduction, explanatory footnotes and other 2026 material are editorial apparatus, not Traherne's prose. An article that uses a modern explanatory note identifies it as such. Historical definitions here are contextual reading glosses; no independent dictionary, manuscript collation or scholarly edition is silently claimed as a source.
Short quotations retain the wording of the annotated edition. Its original capitalization can be rhetorically significant without making every capitalized word a technical term. Brackets and struck-through readings in the source belong to that edition's textual presentation and should not be confused with new words supplied by this lexicon. Biblical phrases and inherited images are discussed as Traherne deploys them; the articles do not turn an allusion into proof of a particular unmentioned source.