ECCLESIASTIC

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does ecclesiastic mean? 

• ECCLESIASTIC (noun)
  The noun ECCLESIASTIC has 1 sense:

1. a clergyman or other person in religious orders

  Familiarity information: ECCLESIASTIC used as a noun is very rare.

• ECCLESIASTIC (adjective)
  The adjective ECCLESIASTIC has 1 sense:

1. of or associated with a church (especially a Christian Church)

  Familiarity information: ECCLESIASTIC used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ECCLESIASTIC (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A clergyman or other person in religious orders

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

churchman; cleric; divine; ecclesiastic

Hypernyms ("ecclesiastic" is a kind of...):

clergyman; man of the cloth; reverend (a member of the clergy and a spiritual leader of the Christian Church)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "ecclesiastic"):

ordainer (a cleric who ordains; a cleric who admits someone to holy orders)

pardoner (a medieval cleric who raised money for the church by selling papal indulgences)

pluralist (a cleric who holds more than one benefice at a time)

Instance hyponyms:

a Kempis; Thomas a Kempis (German ecclesiastic (1380-1471))

Bruno; Saint Bruno; St. Bruno ((Roman Catholic Church) a French cleric (born in Germany) who founded the Carthusian order in 1084 (1032-1101))

• ECCLESIASTIC (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Of or associated with a church (especially a Christian Church)

Classified under:

Relational adjectives (pertainyms)

Synonyms:

ecclesiastic; ecclesiastical

Context example:

ecclesiastic history

Pertainym:

church (one of the groups of Christians who have their own beliefs and forms of worship)

 Context examples 

The ecclesiastics recognized therein the token from above, and asked him on the spot if he would be pope.

(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)

He was not alone at the time, but there was a friend, an American named James Colver, who remained in the boat and did not meet this ecclesiastic.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The aged ecclesiastic had turned his face towards me.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

A courtesy title for an ecclesiastic attached to the chapel of a royal court, college, etc., or to a military unit.

(Chaplain, NCI Thesaurus)

In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older—the same that moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib; that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl on the page of history.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

Fortunately, I had a definite clew, for there was a particular picture in his sketch-book which showed him taking lunch with a certain ecclesiastic at Rosario.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Then came a picture of a cheerful and corpulent ecclesiastic in a shovel hat, sitting opposite a very thin European, and the inscription: "Lunch with Fra Cristofero at Rosario."

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)