clerisy

[kler-uh-see]

noun

1. learned persons as a class; literati; intelligentsia.

Word History and Origins

Origin of clerisy¹

1818; < German Klerisei clergy < Medieval Latin clēricia, equivalent to clēric ( us ) cleric + -ia -ia; introduced by S.T. Coleridge

Example Sentences

Diplomats joined international lawyers and experts from nonprofit foundations and the academy to form a secular clerisy that set rules for governments to impose.

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When Buddhism was joined to Western science, it would generate its own clerisy and become not a thing of infinite passion but a sort of cult, specifically a cult of expertise.

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Obscurantism enveloped in opacity is the academics’ way of assigning themselves status as members of a closed clerisy indulging in linguistic fads.

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Only those the board licenses are admitted to the clerisy uniquely entitled to publicly discuss engineering.

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Indeed, the point of such ludicrous prose is to signal membership in a closed clerisy that possesses a private language.

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