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If you feel like “a hot air balloon that could go to space” or, perhaps, “like a room without a roof,” you might—with all due respect to Pharrell Williams—be not just happy but ecstatic. In other words: euphoric, over the moon, positively brimming with joy or excitement. Ecstatic has been used in English since the late 1500s, arriving (via Medieval Latin) from the Greek adjective ekstatikós meaning, among other things “out of one’s senses.” Ekstatikós, in turn, was formed in part from eksta-, the stem of such verbs as existánai, “to displace or confound,” and exístasthai “to be astonished or lose consciousness.” That seems an appropriate history for a word that can describe someone who is nearly out of their mind with intense emotion. Eksta-, it should be noted, also contributed to the Greek noun ékstasis, meaning “astonishment” or “trance,” which led to ecstasy (the English word, of course, not the universal feeling).
Synonyms of ecstatic
Examples of ecstatic in a Sentence
Barbara Ehrenreich, Civilization, June/July 2000
… in dietary terms we are veritable troglodytes (which, speaking personally, is all right by me). I think this explains a lot, not least my expanding sense of dismay as the waiter bombarded us with ecstatic descriptions of roulades, ratatouilles, empanadas, langostinos … and goodness knows what else.
—Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999
He was ecstatic when he heard that he was going to be a father.
a football player who was ecstatic upon receiving a full athletic scholarship to the college of his choice
Bennett Durando, Denver Post, 6 Jan. 2026
Two and three months ago, Wall Street was captivated by another stellar earnings season, a Federal Reserve resuming rate cuts into a steady economy and constant ecstatic new projections for AI spending.
—Michael Santoli, CNBC, 5 Jan. 2026
Roughly half a millennium after Dante’s death, his poem received an ecstatic welcome in the United States, where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow embarked on the first American translation of all three parts in the early 1860s, as the Civil War raged.
—Eric Bulson, The Atlantic, 2 Jan. 2026
Expect astonishing imagery, ecstatic musicianship, and singing to wring you out and fill you up again.
—Jackson McHenry, Vulture, 31 Dec. 2025
See All Example Sentences for ecstatic
Cite this Entry
“Ecstatic.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ecstatic. Accessed 10 Jan. 2026.
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