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saint

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //seɪnt//
  • //sən(t)//
  • /[sn̩(t)]/
  • /[sɨn(t)]/

A deceased person whom a church or another religious group has officially recognised as especially holy or godly; one eminent for piety and virtue.

noun

  1. 1

    A deceased person whom a church or another religious group has officially recognised as especially holy or godly; one eminent for piety and virtue.

    The Roman Catholic Church proclaimed Kateri Tekakwitha a saint in 2012.

  2. 2

    One of the blessed in heaven.

    Then ſhall thy Saints unmixt, and from th' impure / Farr ſeparate, circling thy holy Mount / Unfained Halleluiahs to thee ſing,

  3. 3

    A Christian; a faithful believer in the present world.

    Unto the Church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Iesus, called to be Saints, with all that in euery place call vpon the Name of Iesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours.

  4. 4

    figurativeA person with similarly overwhelming positive qualities; one who does good.

    Dorothy Day was a living saint.

    Thanks for looking after the house while I'm away. You're a saint!

  5. 5

    archaicA holy object.

    It is ruine to a man to deuoure ſaintes, and afterward to retracte the vowes.

  6. 6

    Variant of SaintAlternative letter-case form of Saint (“a Mormon, a Latter-day Saint”).

Etymology

From Middle English saint, seint, sainct, seinct, sanct, senct, partly from Old English sanct (“saint”) and confluence with Old French saint, seinte (Modern French saint); both from Latin sānctus (“holy, consecrated”, in Late Latin as a noun, “a saint”), past participle of sancīre (“to render sacred, make holy”), akin to sacer (“holy, sacred”). Doublet of Sanctus. Displaced native Middle English halwe (“saint”) from Old English hālga (“saint, holy one”) (> Modern English hallow (“saint”)).

verb

  1. 1

    Synonym of canonize: to honor, formally name, or revere as a saint.

    Many Catholics wished to see Pope John Paul II sainted immediately after his death.

Etymology

From Middle English saynten, seinten, sonten, partly from Anglo-Norman saintir and partly from the noun Middle English seint, seynt (see above).

Forms

plural
saints
past tense
sainted
past participle
sainted
present participle
sainting
third person singular
saints
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).