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Catholic

adjectivenounproper nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈkaθ(ə)lɪk//
  • Australia//ˈkæθ(ə)lɪk//
  • New Zealand//ˈkɛθ(ə)lɪk//
  • //ˈkaf(ə)lɪk//

Of the Western Christian church, as differentiated from e.g. the Orthodox church.

adjective

  1. 1

    Of the Western Christian church, as differentiated from e.g. the Orthodox church.

    Christmas is celebrated at different dates in the Catholic and Orthodox calendars.

  2. 2

    Of the Western Christian church, as differentiated from e.g. the Orthodox church. Of the Roman Catholic church in particular.

    The Church of the Sacred Heart is a Catholic one.

    Catholic churches are adorned differently from Protestant ones.

    A 2017 yearbook photograph obtained by CNN shows Robert Westman, later known as Robin Westman, then a student at Annunciation Catholic grade school in Minneapolis.

  3. 3

    Variant of catholicAlternative letter-case form of catholic.

Etymology

From Old French catholique, from Latin catholicus, from Ancient Greek καθολικός (katholikós, “universal”), from κατά (katá, “according to”) + ὅλος (hólos, “whole”).

noun

  1. 1

    A member of a Catholic (western Christian) church.

  2. 2

    A member of a Catholic (western Christian) church. A member of the Roman Catholic Church (which is also elliptically called the Catholic Church).

    The wife of the Prime Minister is a Catholic.

    The consubstantialists, who by their success have deserved and obtained the title of Catholics, gloried in the simplicity and steadiness of their own creed, and insulted the repeated variations of their adversaries, who were destitute of any certain rule of faith.

proper noun

  1. 1

    A surname.

Forms

plural
Catholics
comparative
more Catholic
superlative
most Catholic
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).