DERVIS • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Dervis

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noun

Dervis, Dervise, Dervish n.

A Turkish or Persian monk, especially one who professes extreme poverty and leads an austere life.

One of the fanatical followers of the Mahdi, in the Sudan, in the 1880's.

In modern times, a member of an ascetic Muslim sect notable for its devotional exercises, which include energetic chanting or shouting and rhythmic bodily movement, such as whirling, leading to a trance-like state or ecstasy. From these exercises the phrase whirling dervish is derived.

Figuratively, a person who whirls or engages in frenzied activity reminiscent of the dervish (3) dancing.

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Etymology of 'Dervis'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Dervis" Quotes from Famous Books

... and but for the honour of the thing we might have dispensed with the torch-bearers, who ran before the carriage and preceded the donkeys, after we adopted that humbler mode of locomotion. Our row across the river to the chant of the boatmen invoking the aid of a sainted dervish, and our ride through the fertile borders of the Nile, covered with crops and palm-trees, were very lovely, and, after about an hour and a half from Cairo, we emerged upon the Desert. The Pyramids seemed then almost within ...

— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin

... weeds!" shouted the incorrigible No. 5, jumping up from his seat and performing two or three Dervish-like turns. ...

— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty

... looks hard at a thing—and hits harder. Some foolish fellow of the Henley-Whibley reaction wrote that if we were to be conquerors we must be less tender and more ruthless. Shaw answered with really avenging irony, "What a light this principle throws on the defeat of the tender Dervish, the compassionate Zulu, and the morbidly humane Boxer at the hands of the hardy savages of England, France, and Germany." In that sentence an idiot is obliterated and the whole story of Europe told; but it is immensely stiffened ...

— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... circulatory, breathing and balancing apparatus: a waltz, or a dive or a gallop may indeed be highly exciting, thanks to its resultant organic perturbations and its concomitants of overcome difficulty and danger, but even a dancing dervish's intoxicating rotations cannot afford him much of the specific interest of movement as movement. Yet every movement which we accomplish implies a change in our debit and credit of vital economy, a change in our balance of bodily and mental expenditure and replenishment; and this, if brought to ...

— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee