cleric
Americannoun
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a member of the clergy.
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a member of a clerical party.
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(used with a plural verb) clerics, half-sized or small-sized reading glasses worn on the nose, usually rimless or with a thin metal frame.
adjective
noun
Etymology
Origin of cleric
1615–25; < Late Latin clēricus priest < Greek klērikós, equivalent to klêr ( os ) lot, allotment + -ikos -ic
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The cleric spoke in Julis, a quiet Druze village in northern Israel, where the community has set up an "emergency room" to coordinate aid efforts for Druze in Syria.
From Barron's
The charismatic cleric could lean on a vast network of mosques and charitable organizations to coordinate the popular mobilization.
As Archbishop of Westminster, the cleric has become the president of the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales and leads an estimated four million Catholics.
From BBC
John Shaw, Magnus’s deputy, is a brute and a bully; Abel Walker, Magnus’s nephew, is a young innocent; Tom Hearn is a sailor who trained as a cleric and speaks the indigenous languages.
But when young people joined in, the protests morphed into an antiregime uprising that presented the greatest challenge to the country’s Shiite cleric rulers in their almost five decades in power.
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
