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monastery

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈmɒnəstɹi//
  • United States//ˈmɑnəˌstɛɹi//
  • United States//ˈmɑnəstəɹi//

A residence for monks or others who have taken religious vows.

noun

  1. 1

    A residence for monks or others who have taken religious vows.

    The Church was in practice deprived of all public functions and prevented from teaching, publishing books and periodicals, and educating the clergy; monasteries and convents were for the most part dissolved.

Etymology

From Middle English monasterie, from Old French monastere, from Medieval Latin monastērium (“monastery”), from Ancient Greek μοναστήριον (monastḗrion, “hermitage, monastery”), from μοναστήριος (monastḗrios, “alone, made alone”) + -ιον (-ion, “-ium”, suffix forming place names), from μονάζω (monázō, “to be alone”), from μόνος (mónos, “alone”) + -άζω (-ázō, verb-forming suffix). Doublet of minster.

Forms

plural
monasteries
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).