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parson

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈpɑːs(ə)n//
  • United States//ˈpɑɹsən//

An Anglican cleric having full legal control of a parish under ecclesiastical law.

noun

  1. 1

    An Anglican cleric having full legal control of a parish under ecclesiastical law.

  2. 2

    A Protestant minister.

  3. 3

    historicalA Roman Catholic priest of an independent parish church.

    a lewde curate, A parson benyfyced But nothynge well advysed.

Etymology

From Middle English persoun, from Anglo-Norman, Old French persone (“parson, person”), from Medieval Latin persona (“parson, person”), from Latin persona (“person”). Doublet of person and persona.

Forms

plural
parsons
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).