Being in a trance is better than it used to be.

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I looked up trance at wordnik and I see they list 19 definitions.

Here’s the first one pulled from The American Heritage Dictionary:

A hypnotic, cataleptic, or ecstatic state.

I think that describes what I understand a trance to be—zoned out.

As an aside, I always wondered what exactly cataleptic meant so I took this opportunity to look it up. The OED is a big help here telling me it means you’re affected by catalepsy, which means you’re in a trance.

But at least now I know that the word came from Greek and meant to be “seized.”

But back to trance. The mention of ecstatic in the list of what a trance might entail gives you the feeling that being in a trance may not be such a bad thing.

Historically though, being in a trance was a very bad thing.

The first time we hear about trance is when Geoffrey Chaucer scribbled in about 1374

“that lay, as doth these loueres, yn a traunce By-twixen hope and derk desesperaunce”

Geoffrey Chaucer is a guy who sometimes wrote in three languages on a single page; English, French and Latin so it’s fitting that the word trance got into English from Old French and that its ancestors were Latin before that.

What was it back in Chaucer’s day that made a trance such a bad thing?

Etymology of course.

The Latin parent word meant to “cross over” or to “pass” and you can certainly still sense that in words that contain trans.

So a trance was the state of being between life and death. When someone was in a trance they were crossing over from life to that “derk desesperaunce.”

Having noted that the wonderful new resource wordnik lists 19 definitions for trance I have to say that at Urbandictionary almost all the definitions relate to something that isn’t even mentioned in wordnik, or any of the paper-based dictionaries.

To Urbandictionary enthusiasts trance is a kind of music.