conventicle

American  

[kuhn-ven-ti-kuhl] / kənˈvɛn tɪ kəl /

noun

1. a secret or unauthorized meeting, especially for religious worship, as those held by Protestant dissenters in England in the 16th and 17th centuries.

2. a place of meeting or assembly, especially a Nonconformist meeting house.

3. Obsolete. a meeting or assembly.

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conventicle British  

/ kənˈvɛntɪkəl /

noun

1. a secret or unauthorized assembly for worship

2. a small meeting house or chapel for a religious assembly, esp of Nonconformists or Dissenters

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Other Word Forms

• conventicler
  noun
• conventicular
  adjective

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Etymology

Origin of conventicle

1350–1400; Middle English < Latin conventiculum a small assembly. See convent, -i-, -cle ¹

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

conventicle

The house, Helen says, is a perfect conventicle.

From The Vicar of Wrexhill by Mrs Trollope

In the sixth year of his marriage Baxter was brought before the magistrates for holding a conventicle, and was sentenced to be confined in Clerkenwell Gaol.

From How to be Happy Though Married Being a Handbook to Marriage by Edward John Hardy

The lower room of the ground floor, a hall with a large fireplace and surrounded with benches and tables, had served in the last century as a meeting-place for a conventicle of French Protestant refugees.

From Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo

Then there are Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc and quite a conventicle of smaller fry who have been vainly preaching the same apocalypse for years.

From The myth of the Jewish menace in world affairs or, The truth about the forged protocols of the elders of Zion by Lucien Wolf

Or these claims would hold good if he had assembled a smaller 69 number of men, whereby the crime of conventicle would not have been established.

From The Old Yellow Book Source of Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book by Anonymous

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