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afflatus

af·fla·tus/əˈfleɪtəs/noun

afflatus is a noun meaning “A sudden rush of creative impulse or inspiration, often attributed to divine influence” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled A-F-F-L-A-T-U-S and has 3 syllables (af·fla·tus), and it appears about once in every 71 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of afflatus is afflatuses.

What does afflatus mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A sudden rush of creative impulse or inspiration, often attributed to divine influence.

    divine afflatus

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce afflatus?

  • UK /əˈfleɪtəs/
  • US /əˈfleɪtəs/
  • US /-ɾəs/

Afflatus has 3 syllables, split af·fla·tus in writing.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-afflatus.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of afflatus

  • afflatuses plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is afflatus?

Afflatus appears about once in every 71 million words in written English, the 265,644th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Afflatus in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense sudden rush of creative impulse or inspiration:

LanguageWords
Spanishinspiración, aflato

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does afflatus come from?

Unadapted borrowing from Latin afflātus (“breath, blowing or breathing on, spiritual inspiration”), from afflō (“to blow, breathe on or towards”) + -tus (forming action nouns), from ad- (“to, towards”) + flō (“breathe, blow”). See also af-.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).