Word.ws English Dictionary

abbés

abbés is the plural of abbé.

Meaning of abbé

Noun

abbé (plural abbés)

  1. A low-ranking member of the Roman Catholic clergy in France who is not a member of a religious order, is not a priest, and can marry and inherit property; an honorific title for such a clergymember.
    • At graduation [Pierre Simon] Laplace faced an anguishing dilemma. His master’s degree permitted him to take either the priestly vows of celibacy or the title of abbé, signifying a low-ranking clergyman who could marry and inherit property. Abbés did not have good reputations; Voltaire called them...2011, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy, Yale...
  2. (obsolete) A French abbot, the (male) head of an abbey.

Questions about abbés

What is abbés the plural of?
Abbés is the plural of abbé.

Words near abbés in the dictionary

  1. abbur
  2. abby
  3. Abbygail
  4. Abbys
  5. abbé
  6. abbés
  7. ABC
  8. ABC art
  9. ABC book
  10. ABC books
  11. abc conjecture

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: abbés (page history and authors); abbé (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “abbés.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/abb%C3%A9s. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.