clergyman
Americannoun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of clergyman
Explanation
A clergyman is a male religious leader. Priests, rabbis, ministers, or imams are all considered clergymen if they're male. While you can use the terms clergyman and clergywoman to specify male and female religious leaders, both clergyperson and simply clergy are fine too. Any term including clergy is most common in Christianity — Catholic clergymen, for example, include priests, deacons, and bishops. The word comes from the Latin clericus, "learned man or priest."
Vocabulary lists containing clergyman
"The Red Shoes" by Hans Christian Andersen
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Adventures of Don Quixote
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Vocabulary from Readings 5, Unit 4
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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.
See Examples For:
One character we haven’t cracked as successfully as our U.K. cousins, however, is the clergyman detective — odd, given our culture’s puritanical bent.
From Salon ● Jun. 16, 2026
"One of Monaco's distinctive features is a kind of positive secularism, which recognises the legitimate autonomy of the spiritual and temporal spheres," Guillaume Paris, a senior clergyman in Monaco, told AFP.
From Barron's ● Mar. 25, 2026
It turns out that each of them has some tangled history with the deceased clergyman.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 27, 2025
The Chicago-born clergyman, who spent nearly 20 years as a missionary in Peru and eventually obtained citizenship, took the name Leo XIV.
From Barron's ● Nov. 25, 2025
Amelia would go to New Hampshire where her clergyman father had a country church.
From "Lyddie" by Katherine Paterson
He was joined by clergymen including Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, the most senior bishop in Eastern Orthodoxy.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 28, 2025
A group of clergymen took their place on the Western Terrace.
From BBC ● Jun. 21, 2025
Normally, avant-garde financial tools might come from, well, the financial avant-garde -- bankers, merchants, and investors hunting for short-term profits, not clergymen.
From Science Daily ● Jun. 6, 2024
Safronov was among the clergymen who signed a public letter calling for the remains to be returned to his family.
From Seattle Times ● Apr. 24, 2024
And some in Nuenen are done with him: since September he's been having trouble with the Catholic clergymen.
From "Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers" by Deborah Heiligman
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.
