Meaning
The greatest single work of an artist, writer, composer, or builder; a masterpiece regarded as the crowning achievement of a career. It is a formal, often reverent label applied to novels, paintings, albums, buildings, and long projects generally. The term keeps a faintly grand tone from its alchemical past, where it named the transmutation of base matter into gold. Formal and laudatory; slightly grandiose for everyday praise. Regional use: General English (borrowed from Latin).
Origin
Latin for 'great work', from magnus 'great' and opus 'work'. In alchemy the magnum opus or Great Work was the entire process - classically the stages of nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, and rubedo - by which the philosopher's stone was to be created, a lineage traceable to early alchemical texts of the first centuries CE. English carried the phrase over and then widened it: the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest evidence for magnum opus as an English noun dates from 1784, and today it usually means a career-defining masterpiece rather than a laboratory procedure.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- magna opera
- magnum opuses
Usage Examples
- Critics generally agree that her fourth novel remains her magnum opus.
- He spent eleven years on the cathedral dome, the magnum opus of his late career.
- The band's double album is widely heard as their magnum opus, sprawling and unapologetically ambitious.