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Question: With respect the the three degrees of glory, what does the word "telestial" mean?
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Question
What does the word "telestial" mean, as used in Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon's vision (see DC 76 of the post-mortal worlds?
Answer
Telestial is a neologism (a "new word") that was coined as part of the revelation of D&C 76. English allows and even encourages creation of neologisms richly all the time (see for instance Shakespeare). That's just the way the language works, and is one of the reasons English has become a lingua franca in our modern world.
Celestial and terrestrial are both derived from Latin. The word caelum means "sky, heaven"; turned into an adjective, that form becomes caelestis "heavenly"; and apparently that ending was extended with another Latin adjectival ending, -(i)alis, to get the form caelestialus. The Latin ending -us was dropped when the word was anglicized (and the ae diphthong was reduced), giving us "celestial."
Terrestrial underwent a similar evolution. Terra means "earth"; terrestris is the adjectival form, "of or relating to the earth"; and terrestrialus would be an extended adjectival form, with the -us ending being dropped in English, for terrestrial.
Telestial appears to have been formed by analogy to celestial. Working backwards, the hypothetical forms would be telestialus, then telestis. The -stial is thus an adjectival formation. The question then becomes what the root tele signifies.
There is of course no answer book we can open to find out for sure what was intended. But it seems to me most likely that the root was taken from Greek. One possibility would be telos, which means "end, purpose"; the cognate verb telein means "to bring to an end; to complete."[1]
Another possibility is that the root comes from the Greek adverb tele, which means "far away, distant." This root is commonly seen in English formations, such as telephone, telescope and television. As an adverb, normally it is a combining form with other words, but it may convey the basic idea of something far away or distant (from God?), or it may have been coined backwards from English telescope, reflecting the basic idea that the stars (which are used as a symbol for telestial beings--see DC 76) are far away (i.e., much further than the sun or moon).
All we have at this point is guesswork to go by, but it is an interesting linguistic question.