FUNERAL PYRE

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does funeral pyre mean? 

• FUNERAL PYRE (noun)
  The noun FUNERAL PYRE has 1 sense:

1. wood heaped for burning a dead body as a funeral rite

  Familiarity information: FUNERAL PYRE used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• FUNERAL PYRE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Wood heaped for burning a dead body as a funeral rite

Classified under:

Nouns denoting groupings of people or objects

Synonyms:

funeral pyre; pyre

Hypernyms ("funeral pyre" is a kind of...):

agglomerate; cumulation; cumulus; heap; mound; pile (a collection of objects laid on top of each other)

 Context examples 

The maneuver did not succeed as well as she expected, however, for though just in the act of setting fire to a funeral pyre, the Professor dropped his torch, metaphorically speaking, and made a dive after the little blue ball.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

I trust that the labour and hazard of an investigation—of which the smallest results have been slowly pieced together, in the pressure of arduous avocations, under grinding penurious apprehensions, at rise of morn, at dewy eve, in the shadows of night, under the watchful eye of one whom it were superfluous to call Demon—combined with the struggle of parental Poverty to turn it, when completed, to the right account, may be as the sprinkling of a few drops of sweet water on my funeral pyre. I ask no more.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)