astral plane
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English
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Audio (General Australian): (file)
Noun
[edit]astral plane (plural astral planes)
- (parapsychology, theosophy, fantasy) A supernatural plane of existence consisting of the world of the celestial spheres, propounded by esoteric philosophies, some religious teachings, and New Age thought.
- Synonyms: astral world, desire world
- 1936, Rollo Ahmed, The Black Art, London: Long, page 115:
- Incidentally, such beings may be said to have an existence of a sort upon the lower astral plane; they are elementals created by man's evil desires and unclean thoughts.
- 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 221:
- The realm of the astral plane is an intermediate realm; below is the world of matter, above is the world of pure Being.
- (computing, slang, humorous) A Unicode plane (range of code points) above the Basic Multilingual Plane; any plane beyond
U+FFFF
.- Emoji are in the astral plane.
- 2002, David Brownell, SAX2, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 110:
- If your application works with MathML, or in various languages whose character sets gained support in Unicode 3.1 through the so-called Astral Planes, you will need to know that what Java calls a char is not really the same thing as a Unicode character or an XML character.
- 2009, Mark Pilgrim, Dive Into Python 3, Apress, →ISBN, page 55:
- UTF-16 encodes every character from O—65535 as 2 bytes; it then uses some dirty hacks if you actually need to represent the rarely used astral plane Unicode characters beyond 65535.
- 2011, Tom Anderson, “Efficient unicode string implementation was: Re: Why No Supplemental Characters In Character Literals?”, in comp.lang.java.programmer[2] (Usenet):
- The astral planes include some such characters, notably in the CJK extensions, without which it is impossible to write some people's names correctly.
- 2011, David Hunter, Jeff Rafter, et al. (6 other authors), Beginning XML, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 134:
- Such characters are in the so-called “Astral Planes,” with a code point above U+FFFF.
- 2014, Axel Rauschmayer, Speaking JavaScript, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 364:
- Let's assume you want to display a Unicode character via JavaScript that is in an astral plane (obviously, there is a risk when doing so: not all fonts support all such characters).
Translations
[edit]a supernatural plane of existence
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