ecstasy

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)Intense pleasure.

   “This is the very ecstasy of love, / Whose violent property fordoes itself / And leads the will to desperate undertakings / As oft as any passion under heaven / That does afflict our natures.”

   “He loved me well, and oft would beg me sing; / Which when I did, he on the tender grass / Would sit, and hearken even to ecstasy,”

   “In fact, Tarzan had never killed for “pleasure,” nor to him was there pleasure in killing. It was the joy of righteous battle that he loved—the ecstasy of victory.”

2. (countable, uncountable)A state of emotion so intense that a person is carried beyond rational thought and self-control.

   “an ecstasy of remorse”

   “They were thrown into ecstasies of suspicion by finding that we possessed a French translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf.”

3. (countable, uncountable)A trance, frenzy, or rapture associated with mystic or prophetic exaltation.

   “What! are you dreaming, Son! with Eyes cast upwards / Like a mad Prophet in an Ecstasy?”

4. (countable, obsolete, uncountable)Violent emotion or distraction of mind; excessive grief from anxiety; insanity; madness.

   “Come, let us leave him; in his ireful mood / Our words will but increase his ecstasy.”

   “And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, / That suck'd the honey of his music vows, / Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, / Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh; / That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth / Blasted with ecstasy.”

5. (countable, slang, uncountable)The drug MDMA, a synthetic entactogen of the methylenedioxyphenethylamine family, especially in a tablet form.
6. (countable, dated, uncountable)A state in which sensibility, voluntary motion, and (largely) mental power are suspended, and the body is erect and inflexible.

   “The instant I drew out my case of instruments, the lady roused herself from her ecstasy, and has never had a similar attack.”

   “Ecstasy bears a strong resemblance to catalepsy: in both cases the patients, during the paroxysm, lose all connexion with the physical world, being deprived of sense and voluntary motion; but in ecstasy, associations of the most pleasing and enchanting nature are established with an ideal existence in an unknown region, which might perhaps be poetically designated the fairy land of an undescried Elysium.”

   “In ecstasy the mind is absorbed with some fixed idea, generally of a religious character, and the patient becomes oblivious of surrounding events and objects.”

7. (alt-of, slang, uncountable)Alternative letter-case form of ecstasy (“drug”).

verb

1. (intransitive)To experience intense pleasure.
2. (transitive)To cause intense pleasure in.

   “Ali Agha jumped up, seized the visitor by the shoulder, compelled him to sit down, and, ecstasied by the old man's horror at the scene, filled a tumbler, and with the usual grotesque grimaces insisted upon his drinking it.”