Meaning
An unexpected person, event or thing that appears suddenly to solve a problem that seemed hopeless; in fiction it is the contrived ending that resolves the plot by outside intervention. Nearly always a term of criticism, implying the solution is artificial, unearned or too convenient, and it is applied to storytelling, politics, economics and everyday life alike. Formal, critical register, chiefly used of fiction and argument; usually disparaging, so it reads as an accusation of lazy plotting or evasion. Regional use: General English (classical theatrical origin).
Origin
Latin for 'god from the machine', a translation of the Greek 'apo mechanes theos'. In the ancient Greek theatre the machine was the mechane, a crane that swung an actor playing a god over the stage building and down into the action; a riser through a trapdoor served the same purpose. Aeschylus used the device and it became routine under Euripides, whom Aristophanes parodied for his fondness for it; more than half of Euripides' surviving tragedies close with a god settling everything, most famously Helios' dragon-drawn chariot rescuing Medea. Aristotle discussed the device in the Poetics, and Horace fixed the rule in the Ars Poetica: a god should intervene only when a knot worthy of a god's unravelling occurs. English writers borrowed the Latin tag late in the seventeenth century - the OED's earliest evidence is from 1697 - and it has served ever since as the standing name for a contrived, unearned rescue, now a general term of criticism for any improbable last-minute solution.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- dei ex machina
- deus ex machina ending
- god from the machine
Usage Examples
- The novel collapses in its final pages, when an unknown uncle arrives like a deus ex machina to settle every debt.
- Stranded climbers were saved by a passing helicopter, a genuine deus ex machina after two days on the ridge.
- Critics said the plan amounted to waiting for a deus ex machina rather than fixing the underlying problem.