means So grand, beautiful, or awe-inspiring that it overwhelms ordinary measure and stirs something close to reverence.

from From Latin sublimis, 'uplifted, lofty, exalted' — possibly built from sub- (up to) and limen (lintel, threshold), the high beam over a doorway, as if pointing toward the very top of the frame. It arrived in English through the 16th-century vocabulary of alchemy, where to 'sublime' a substance was to vaporize a solid and let it rise to a higher, purer form — and that sense of something rising past its ordinary state carried into the lofty, awe-struck meaning we use today.