pilgrim
noun
a person who journeys, especially a long distance, to some sacred place as an act of religious devotion.
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pilgrim
American
[pil-grim, -gruhm]
/ ˈpɪl grɪm, -grəm /
noun
-
pilgrims
plural
-
a person who journeys, especially a long distance, to some sacred place as an act of religious devotion.
pilgrims to the Holy Land.
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a traveler or wanderer, especially in a foreign place.
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an original settler in a region.
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(initial capital letter) one of the band of Puritans who founded the colony of Plymouth, Mass., in 1620.
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a newcomer to a region or place, especially to the western U.S.
pilgrim
1
British
/ ˈpɪlɡrɪm /
noun
-
a person who undertakes a journey to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion
-
any wayfarer
Pilgrim
2
British
/ ˈpɪlɡrɪm /
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of pilgrim
First recorded in 1150–1200; Middle English pelegrim, pilegrim, cognate with Old Frisian pilegrīm, Middle Low German pelegrīm, Old High German piligrīm, Old Norse pīlagrīmr, all from Medieval Latin pelegrīnus, dissimilated variant of Latin peregrīnus peregrine
Explanation
You might be a Muslim on your way to Mecca, or a Hindu going to the Ganges, or a Christian traveling to Lourdes. When you make a reverent journey to a place you consider sacred, you're a pilgrim. You can also use the word less seriously and call yourself a pilgrim when you make the trip to Graceland for Elvis Week. Another kind of pilgrim (often spelled with a capital P) are the Puritans who fled religious persecution in Europe, came over on the Mayflower, and founded Plymouth Colony, in Massachusetts. The word comes from the Latin peregrinus, "foreign," or "a foreigner," and if you just travel to foreign countries, you’re a pilgrim, too.
Vocabulary lists containing pilgrim
Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" Speech (1963)
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November Words
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World Religions
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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 young Japanese pilgrim who had just completed the route took our photo.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 6, 2026
“I’m just a weary pilgrim trying to find what feels like home,” she sings.
From Salon ● Aug. 28, 2026
Another pilgrim who was on the bus, 53-year-old Vijayabhuvaneshwari, said: "We had no choice."
From Barron's ● Aug. 28, 2026
I had only ever seen him on Zoom, and although he was tall, which was nice, I tried not to judge his brown cracked-leather buckled pilgrim shoes paired with high-waist Wrangler jeans.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 7, 2026
“It seems that the crock with Mrs. Kabakoff’s pilgrim cider has fallen from the top shelf. Would you please run and bring Mr. Vendleri?”
From "The Wednesday Wars" by Gary D. Schmidt
Pilgrim Fatemeh Moradi, 52, has been to the Arbaeen at least five times before, but said that this year is for "our martyred leader, on his behalf and on the behalf of all the martyrs".
From Barron's ● Aug. 1, 2026
An evacuation center was opened at Pilgrim Congregational Church at 2850 Foothill Blvd. in Redding.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 22, 2025
The state produces only about half as much electricity as it did in 2010 because of closures of coal plants and the Pilgrim nuclear plant in 2019.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 23, 2025
In the 1860s, when the Pilgrim story was fully enshrined as one of the pillars of capital-H History, Thanksgiving became a national holiday.
From Slate ● Nov. 28, 2024
Billy Pilgrim nestled like a spoon with the hobo on Christmas night, and he fell asleep, and he traveled in time to 1967 again—to the night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from Tralfamadore.
From "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut
The combined toll is 1,428 people dead and more than 5,649 missing, including around 800 foreigners, among them tourists and pilgrims.
From Barron's ● Sep. 11, 2026
Our revised route blessed us with hundreds of encounters with pilgrims.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 6, 2026
More than 800 foreigners from at least 34 countries are among the missing, including tourists and pilgrims, in both Nepal and Tibet in China.
From Barron's ● Sep. 4, 2026
Foreign diplomatic missions were expecting heavy traffic of pilgrims this year, including Indian-Americans, according to a U.S. diplomat in the region.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 1, 2026
The sandstone cliffs were home to Buddhist monks who carved caves in them to use as living quarters and as sanctuary for weary traveling pilgrims.
From "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini
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.
