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
The ‘Schitt’s Creek’ star returns as a Protestant clergyman who becomes entangled with the mob in this Netflix series co-starring Taylor Ortega and Laurie Metcalf.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 9, 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
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
British officers would not allow him a Bible or a visit from a clergyman.
From "George Washington, Spymaster" by Thomas B. Allen
Ebel and Diestel were provincial clergymen, scarcely known outside their parishes until, as Mr. Clark says, scandal tightened around them.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 27, 2026
The building has also sparked concern among senior clergymen involved with the project.
From BBC ● Jan. 13, 2025
With other prominent Black clergymen, he helped to win the release of Nelson Mandela and end apartheid in South Africa.
From Salon ● Oct. 13, 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
High-ranking clergymen experimented with the dangerous ideas of the void and the infinite, even though the ideas struck at the core of the ancient Greek philosophy that the church cherished so much.
From "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife
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.
