Skip to content
OneKitly

burial

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈbɛɹi.əl//
  • United States//ˈbɛɹi.əl//
  • United States//ˈbɝi.əl//

The act of burying; interment; placing remains into the earth.

noun

  1. 1

    The act of burying; interment; placing remains into the earth.

    His whole family was present at his burial.

    The mourners listened as the priest performed the burial service of long-time parishioner Wendy Stuart.

    A dreary year for the Squadron, this 1819, when officers and men fell sick by the shipload and were sent home by the tenderful, when Lemon Valley Hospital was supplemented by the one at High Peak, when Court-Martials were held at the rate of one a fortnight, burials thrice a week, and surveys on foul provisions every other day!

    However, many Cromlechs and Dolmins are carelessly called "Druid's circles", when in reality they were the burial places of ancient chieftains and their households[.]

Etymology

From Middle English biriel, a backformation from biriels, which was re-interpreted as a plural, itself from from Old English byrġels, from byrġan (“to bury”) + -els. By surface analysis, bury + -al, but originally unrelated to this suffix.

Forms

plural
burials
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).