abbey
/ˈæbi/
nouna church with buildings connected to it in which a group of monks or nuns live or used to live
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Examples
1. The abbey was amply provisioned.
2. Abbey: High waisted.
3. Come here, Abbey.
4. In fact, her mom teaches my daughter Abbey dance.
5. Abbey: Been thinking about you.
aisle
/ˈaɪəɫ/, /ˈaɪɫ/
nounthe lower section of a church, divided by columns, that runs parallel to the nave, transept, or choir
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Examples
1. Meat aisles were empty across supermarkets around the country,.
2. Anyway, aisle seat isn’t only about leg room.
3. So skip that aisle altogether.
4. So you crossed the aisles politically there.
5. Many planes don't have aisle 13.
apse
/ˈæps/
nouna small curved area in a church, particularly at the east end of it
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Examples
1. You can see the apses.
2. Those were Domitian's apses.
3. The transformation of the apse of the basilica culminated first with the new dome atop the gothic lantern tower, and later with the construction of the clock tower.
4. The transformation of the apse of the basilica culminated first with the new dome atop the gothic lantern tower, and later with the construction of the clock tower.
5. But there's a particular taste for apses in these late Roman buildings.
cathedral
/kəˈθidɹəɫ/
nounthe largest and most important church of a specific area, which is controlled by a bishop
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Examples
1. These cathedrals are above politics.
2. Cathedral facades are another.
3. Cathedrals were much more urban in their location.
4. You can rebuild Notre Dame cathedral.
5. This cathedral is incredible.
chapel
/ˈtʃæpəɫ/
nouna small room or building belonging to a hospital, prison, school, etc. where Christians can pray and perform religious services in
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Examples
1. A chapel coming to me! -
2. What is the Chapel again?
3. Also, we have chapel before every game.
4. The chapel houses a telephone helpline.
5. The park consisted of chapels, crosses and catacombs.
chapter house
/tʃˈæptɚ hˈaʊs/
nouna building where clergy members hold meetings
Examples
choir
/ˈkwaɪɝ/
nounan area in a church that is occasionally occupied by a group of singers performing together while religious ceremonies are held
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Examples
1. Where's my choir?
2. Women's choir called the Ardin and Kettle Drums.
3. Their choir concert that they're doing.
4. Anyway, today the kids have choir practice.
5. I quit the choir.
church
/ˈtʃɝtʃ/
nouna building where Christians go to worship and practice their religion
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Examples
1. Church is important, Stan.
2. Churches sit alongside temples.
3. Church: Stop it.
4. Church: Stop it.
5. That is, churches should support the preachers and missionaries.
cloister
/ˈkɫɔɪstɝ/
nouna covered walking area with several stone arches, which surrounds a square garden in a church, monastery, etc.
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Examples
1. But not even a sacred cloister can keep out a deadly virus.
2. I have intentionally cloistered myself and not looked at anyone else's videos on the subject.
3. Everyone is cloistered inside their faceless homes.
4. She's a cloistered nun in a monastery in Germany.
5. Generally speaking, life in a Sōhei monastery was more akin to a barracks than a spiritual cloister.
convent
/ˈkɑnˌvɛnt/, /ˈkɑnvənt/
nouna building where a group of nuns live and work together
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Examples
1. It took place 5 years ago here in this convent.
2. His work has shown a particular interest in women's spirituality and mysticism, especially in convents throughout the German-speaking world, with special attention to book illuminations.
3. She grew up in a Benedictine convent.
4. Here are the ruins of that Benedictine convent.
5. Meanwhile, in 1626 near Loudun, the Ursuline convent was established.
friary
/ˈfɹaɪɝi/
nouna place of residence for male members of one of many Christian religious groups, called friars, who used to spread Christianity around the world
Examples
gurdwara
/ɡɜːdwˈɑːɹɹə/
nouna building used as a place of worship for Sikhs
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Examples
1. We could ask how it went for the Sikhs who built their first gurdwara in Stockton, California, in 1912.
2. They would look at the gurdwara through binoculars.
hermitage
/ˈhɝmətədʒ/
nouna place of solitude where a religious person resides, away from the distractions of the outside world
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Examples
1. But the Adirondack hermitages present problems in the winter.
2. He ordered 200 bottles of Hermitage wine.
3. He ordered 200 good bottles of Hermitage wine.
4. Much like the hermitage monastery, this next location was also built into some rocks but is placed in a private community in the Grenadines.
5. You've got the Uffizi, you've got the MoMA, the Hermitage, the Rijks, the Van Gogh.
Kaaba
/kˈɑːbə/
nouna black cube-like building located inside a mosque in Mecca, which is the holiest place for Muslims and which they pray towards and walk around as a religious ceremony
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Examples
1. On the 8th day of Dhu al-Hijjah, worshippers begin the rituals of the Hajj with Tawaf, entering the Grand Mosque and encircling the Kaaba counterclockwise seven times.
2. And there’s no Kaaba on Mars, last time we sent a rover to check.
3. They were together while doing tawāf, the circular walk around the Kaaba.
4. I left the Kaaba to eat something in downtown Mecca.
5. And if there was a big emphasis at the time to separate men from women, the rituals around the Kaaba could have been designed accordingly.
monastery
/ˈmɑnəˌstɛɹi/
nouna building where a group of monks live and pray
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Examples
1. Different monasteries have different liturgies.
2. Some monasteries have more prayer and less contemplation, or less prayer and more work.
3. The monasteries were gone.
4. You mentioned a monastery.
5. The most powerful institutions in Ireland were monasteries.
mosque
/ˈmɑsk/, /ˈmɔsk/
nouna place of worship, used by Muslims
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Examples
1. The mosque is a gathering place.
2. Mosques were actually firebombed.
3. In the Albanian countryside, even the smallest villages have new mosques.
4. During the 30 days of Ramadan, the Imam Reza mosque hosts a break fast of epic proportions.
5. In Pakistan now, the mosques are handing out contraception.
narthex
/nˈɑːɹθɛks/
nounan enclosed area consisting of pillars located at the western entrance of an old church
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Examples
1. And you can see the narthex here, just as we saw it in the Temple of Minerva Medica.
nave
/ˈneɪv/
nounthe long and central part of a church where people sit to worship God
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Examples
1. On into the nave, where there is a smell of sweat and yesterday's incense.
2. It's a basilican plan: central nave, two side aisles.
3. This is the Basilica Ulpia in Rome, with a central nave, and side aisles, a couple of side aisles around it.
4. But at the bottom of the nave there's a little door which leads through to the Lady Chapel.
5. Let's see, there she is on her seventieth birthday in the nave of Sterling Memorial Library.
nunnery
/ˈnənɝi/
nouna building occupied by a group of nuns
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Examples
1. His final gallery showing would debut across the street from the nunnery which houses Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper.
2. By 1540, every monastery and nunnery in the kingdom had gone.
3. Though the women ran the nunnery themselves, they still confessed to a male priest.
4. Isabella was at that time living in a nunnery.
5. And the destination was a single room in a nunnery, where a woman had gone into lifelong retreat 55 years before.
pagoda
/pəˈɡoʊdə/
nouna multi-story temple located in East or South Asia with a curved roof at each story
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Examples
1. Just like in the film, the hero fights their way up a five story pagoda.
2. And there’s a pagoda right beside it.
3. Consider drum, cone, pagoda, cylinder and other shapes.
4. In addition to the Buddhas, this modern structure also includes a fivel-level pagoda shaped like a lotus flower.
5. Here's pagoda structures.
parsonage
/ˈpɑɹsənɪdʒ/
nouna house where a member of the clergy resides
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Examples
1. I first met the man who would become my husband, John Adams, when I was but a teenage girl, growing up in my Father’s Parsonage in in Weymouth, Massachusetts.
2. They say that away down in the village, and even in the distant parsonage, that cry raised the sleepers from their beds.
3. Perhaps, by way of the roofs, we would be able to reach the parsonage.
4. "But he was not, and the neighbors would hear her weeping in the parsonage in the afternoons or late at night, and the neighbors knowing that the husband would not know what to do about it because he did not know what was wrong."
priory
/ˈpɹaɪɝi/
nouna place of residence for a community of nuns or monks that is smaller or less important compared to an abbey
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Examples
1. Barking was located just a mile away from St. Leonard's Priory in Stratford, the community led by Chaucer's prioress in his Canterbury Tales.
2. Bodley 155 is the only complete gospel book to survive from an Abbey or Priory of Benedictine nuns in medieval England.
3. At the priories fall, its people came too late, amidst clamour and cries.
4. With the country having broken from the pope in Rome to secure Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, nearly 900 religious houses, from monasteries to abbeys and priories, were now under the control of the king himself.
5. Born near the Scottish village of Duns, from which he took the name, Duns Scotus was ordained into the Catholic Franciscan Order at St. Andrew’s Priory, Northampton, England in 1291.
pulpit
/ˈpʊɫpɪt/
nouna small enclosed platform with stairs in a church, on which a priest stands to preach to people
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Examples
1. He has lost his pulpit.
2. No pulpit, no sermons, as there are no clergy in the Bahá'í faith.
3. The president has a bully pulpit.
4. So a boy saw a large snake under the pulpit.
5. Politicians took to their pulpit to denounce pinball.
rectory
/ˈɹɛktɝi/
nounthe house of a priest in charge of a specific area in the church of England called a rector
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Examples
1. so obviously they're all leaving that for season 4 the title of the episode the rectory and Morty Tate is a reference to the movie The Manchurian Candidate, but is also a bit of a gravity falls Easter Egg the stanchion candidate even though the plot of both of those episodes is a little bit different
2. For this project, Diana worked with curator Paul Amenta and SiTE:LAB-- a Grand Rapids-based organization that creates temporary, site-specific art projects-- to take over this vacant house that was once a rectory.
3. That afternoon the young ladies from the Rectory (one of them read Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had struggled with Dante for years), coming to see Miss Swaffer, tried their German and Italian on him from the doorway.
4. The rectory took much notice of him about that time, and I believe the young ladies attempted to prepare the ground for his conversion.
5. He finds a church and goes to the rectory and explains to the priest.
sanctuary
/ˈsæŋktʃuˌɛɹi/
nounthe area of a religious building that is considered as the most sacred
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Examples
1. The sanctuary was in the country of Oman.
2. Joanne Lefson runs the sanctuary.
3. Between August and December that year, nearly 46,000 people visited the sanctuary.
4. The sanctuary was started 36 years ago.
5. This studio is a sanctuary.
meeting house
/mˈiːɾɪŋ hˈaʊs/
nouna place where a Christian group called Quakers gather and worship God
Examples
minaret
/ˌmɪnɝˈɛt/
nouna thin and tall tower, often on top of a mosque, from which Muslim are summoned to prayers
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Examples
1. And if we follow that road along, we actually come to a location where there’s a mosque with a dome and minaret.
2. What constitutes a good operatic voice?-- which may be a little bit different than what constitutes a good church voice or a good synagogue voice or a good mosque voice on top of a minaret, whatever it might happen to be.
3. The citadel of Kasbah in Marrakesh and the great Mosques of Tinmal, al-Kutubiyya and Seville, as well as the massive minaret of Hassan, all serve as the legacy of Almohad architects.
4. The castle itself is built around an old monastery, and is made up of colored sections, including a red clock tower and a yellow minaret.
5. In certain countries, mosque minarets are being banned.
screen
/ˈskɹin/
nounan ornate partition made of wood or stone, partly separating the main area of a church from other parts such as the choir or altar
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Examples
1. Screen still works.
2. Screen grab everything.
3. A force of light Bithynian skirmishers was screening his infantry.
4. Screen is perfectly fine.
5. That means screens.
shrine
/ˈʃɹaɪn/
nouna place or building for people to pray in, which is considered holy by many due to its connection with a sacred person, event, or object
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Examples
1. - Make a shrine over here.
2. Now my shrine is complete.
3. The prophets of the tenth century, the ninth century BCE were associated with religious shrines.
4. Household shrines to countless deities filled the homes of Romans on all shores of the Mediterranean.
5. The shrine had a frieze around it.
spire
/ˈspaɪɹ/
nouna pointed and long structure in the shape of a cone, which is built on top of a church or other tall buildings
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Examples
1. Slay the Spire.
2. The spires on the top are 40 meters tall.
3. But the futuristic spire was scaled back due to practical concerns like wind and weight.
4. He secretly constructed a 185-foot steel spire inside the building.
5. Ice-cream cones are perfect for the conical spires on top of the turrets.
stained glass
/stˈeɪnd ɡlˈæs/
nouncolorful pieces of glass put together in decorative patterns to form pictorial designs, typically found in the windows of churches
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Examples
1. There is also another cookie called the Stained Glass cookie which is very popular.
steeple
/ˈstipəɫ/
nouna tall and pointed tower on a church, often topped by a spire
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Examples
1. Access your memory on a church steeple.
2. So we follow the conduits back down the steeple, through the church and out back to the equipment shelter.
3. Is there steeple chase?
4. Two o’clock sounded from the steeple of the church.
5. There's a church with a steeple.
synagogue
/ˈsɪnəˌɡɔɡ/
nouna place of worship and religious study for Jews
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Examples
1. Hundred of synagogues are burned.
2. Now, some people who are Jewish call the synagogue the temple.
3. A makeshift synagogue was set up in an alcove of the education center.
4. The synagogue has hosted concerts with classical legends like Franz Liszt.
5. Before the war you had many synagogues, many rabbis.
temple
/ˈtɛmpəɫ/
nouna building used for worshiping one or several gods, used by some religious communities, especially Buddhists and Hindus
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Examples
1. The temple is my home.
2. Shirley Temples are up.
3. At that time, the great king of Egypt built many temples.
4. An enemy host surrounded the temple.
5. The temple sits on a large reef rock in the river.
transept
/tɹænsˈɛpt/
nouneither of the two hands at the sides of a cross-shaped church, which sticks out of the long central part of the church at a 90-degree angle
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Examples
1. The one that is so powerful in my mind is the Transept as you enter into Memorial Hall where the names of Harvard Union dead are honored on the walls.
2. And they had erected part of the transept building and decorated its four chapels.
3. At each side of the gigantic transept, two monumental and sculptured façades were lifted, in which two of the three main doors to the basilica were placed.
4. And they had erected part of the transept building and decorated its four chapels.
5. At each side of the gigantic transept, two monumental and sculptured façades were lifted, in which two of the three main doors to the basilica were placed.
vault
/ˈvɔɫt/
nouna chamber located under a church or cemetery, which is used for burying the dead, particularly those sharing a family bond
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Examples
1. Open the vault!
2. And land in the colonies essentially vaulted your political status.
3. Vaults, I like the sound of vaults.
4. It vaults the very concrete materiality, the physicality, of these characters and their circumstances.
5. - I pole vaulted.
vicarage
/vˈɪkæɹɪdʒ/
nounthe house of a priest in the church of England
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Examples
1. My rose was also sending out wild shoots like the roses in the vicarage garden.
ziggurat
/ˈzɪɡɝˌæt/
nouna rectangular tower in ancient Mesopotamia with steps on its sides, which is often topped by a temple
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Examples
1. The tower in the story of the Tower of Babel is identified by scholars as a very famous tower, a ziggurat, a ziggurat to Marduk in Babylon.
2. The tower in the story of the Tower of Babel is identified by scholars as a very famous tower, a ziggurat, a ziggurat to Marduk in Babylon.
3. The construction of Marduk's ziggurat is represented as displeasing to God.
4. Nebuchadnezzar's ziggurat was the biggest one ever made.
5. The thing on the right is a snake form, a ziggurat.
gargoyle
/ˈɡɑɹˌɡɔɪɫ/
nounstone figures that resemble a hideous creature and that are attached to the top of some old buildings, particularly old churches, for carrying rain water off the roof
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Examples
1. Wow, a little gargoyle came out of there.
2. Gulping gargoyles!
3. The snake just basically stays in gargoyle mode.
4. - Look like a gargoyle.
5. So are gargoyles crows?
flying buttress
/flˈaɪɪŋ bˈʌtɹəs/
nounan arched structure made of stone used for supporting the outer wall of a building, especially a church
Examples