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archbishop

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˌɑː(ɹ)t͡ʃˈbɪʃəp//

A senior bishop who is in charge of an archdiocese, and presides over a group of dioceses called a province (in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, etc.)

noun

  1. 1

    A senior bishop who is in charge of an archdiocese, and presides over a group of dioceses called a province (in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, etc.)

    Thereupon I declared that I was a heretic and a barbarian—“Je suis hérétique et barbare,” I said, “and that these archbishops and cardinals and monsignors, and the rest of them, meant nothing at all to me.

    He passed over several archbishops who would traditionally become cardinals to promote Gregory. He also moved Augustine Tolton, who died in 1897 after becoming the first African American priest, one step closer to sainthood.

    One of those 19 candidates was Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, the archbishop of St. Louis from 2004 to 2008.

  2. 2

    A fairy chess piece which combines the moves of the bishop and the knight.

Etymology

From Middle English erchebischop, archebischop, from Old English arċebisċop (“archbishop”), from Late Latin or Ecclesiastical Latin archiepiscopus, from Ancient Greek ἀρχιεπίσκοπος (arkhiepískopos), from ἀρχι- (arkhi-, “first, chief”) + ἐπίσκοπος (epískopos, “overseer”), from ἐπισκοπέω (episkopéō, “to watch over”), from ἐπί (epí, “over”) + σκοπέω (skopéō, “to examine”), equivalent to arch- + bishop.

Forms

plural
archbishops
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).