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:
A clergyman I met at Reagan National Airport recently told me that our world is as filled with corruption as a Latin American animal shelter is filled with fleas.
From Salon ● Sep. 18, 2026
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
It was a condition of nearly all Oxford and Cambridge fellowships that the holder was ordained, so nearly every academic in England was a clergyman.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
Some clergymen are uneasy about chatbots that claim to provide spiritual guidance.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 14, 2026
The building has also sparked concern among senior clergymen involved with the project.
From BBC ● Jan. 13, 2025
Between the pomp surrounding donning one’s holy livery, pointed glares and swishing red silks and velvets, these cassocked clergymen make bored teenagers seem kind.
From Salon ● Nov. 22, 2024
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
Meanwhile, clergymen, college presidents, and other self-appointed spokesmen for communal standards of morality seized upon the Burr-Hamilton encounter to launch a crusade against dueling throughout most of the northern states.
From "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" by Joseph J. Ellis
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.
