Word.ws English Dictionary

bell, book and candle

bell, book and candle phrase: an expression denoting excommunication by anathema according to a rite of the Latin Church.

Phrase

bell, book and candle

  1. An expression denoting excommunication by anathema according to a rite of the Latin Church.
    • I am afraid Jim Crow was a hardened sinner, and, alas! we had no one on board duly qualified to do for him with "bell, book and candle" what had been done ages before to his ancestor at Rheims.1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 36

Questions about bell, book and candle

What does bell, book and candle mean?
Bell, book and candle means an expression denoting excommunication by anathema according to a rite of the Latin Church.
What part of speech is bell, book and candle?
Bell, book and candle is a phrase.

Words near bell, book and candle in the dictionary

  1. Bell's palsy
  2. Bell's sparrow
  3. Bell's sparrows
  4. Bell's theorem
  5. Bell's vireo
  6. bell, book and candle
  7. bell-bearer
  8. bell-bearers
  9. bell-bind
  10. bell-bottom
  11. bell-bottom trousers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bell, book and candle (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “bell, book and candle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bell%2C_book_and_candle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.