Directed toward God or moving in the direction of the divine; oriented spiritually upward.
From Old English 'god' plus '-ward' (direction, from Proto-Germanic 'warthi'). The suffix '-ward' originally meant 'looking toward' and appears in words like 'forward' and 'afterward.' Combined with 'god,' it creates the sense of spiritual orientation, popularized especially in medieval religious writing.
The '-ward' suffix is brilliant for showing direction—we say 'forward' and 'backward,' but 'godward' shows that people thought of divinity as something you could move *toward*, literally or spiritually!
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