SANCTUM (sancta)

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

Irregular inflected form: sancta   

 Dictionary entry overview: What does sanctum mean? 

• SANCTUM (noun)
  The noun SANCTUM has 2 senses:

1. a place of inviolable privacy

2. a sacred place of pilgrimage

  Familiarity information: SANCTUM used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• SANCTUM (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A place of inviolable privacy

Classified under:

Nouns denoting spatial position

Synonyms:

sanctum; sanctum sanctorum

Context example:

he withdrew to his sanctum sanctorum, where the children could never go

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

retreat (a place of privacy; a place affording peace and quiet)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A sacred place of pilgrimage

Classified under:

Nouns denoting spatial position

Synonyms:

holy; holy place; sanctum

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

place; spot; topographic point (a point located with respect to surface features of some region)

 Context examples 

It was on the afternoon of the day before the fight that this conversation took place between my uncle and myself in the dainty sanctum of his Jermyn-Street house.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

“I was not aware that there was any individual, alien to this tenement, in your sanctum.”

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Returning, the boy beckoned him from halfway across the room and led him to the private office, the editorial sanctum.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

With some curiosity as to what could have sent a brother medico to us at such an hour, I followed Holmes into our sanctum.

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

It was after supper, in his own sanctum—the room of the pink radiance and the innumerable trophies—that Lord John Roxton had something to say to us.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

In passing the door of that sanctum some time after, I caught the words—I wrote to Moor House and to Cambridge immediately, to say what I had done: fully explaining also why I had thus acted.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Sometimes we saw him passing in lonely majesty to his inner sanctum, with his eyes staring vaguely and his mind hovering over the Balkans or the Persian Gulf.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

For myself, I had no need to make any change; I should not be called upon to quit my sanctum of the schoolroom; for a sanctum it was now become to me,—"a very pleasant refuge in time of trouble."

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)