Word.ws English Dictionary

contemptus mundi

contemptus mundi noun: contempt for worldly concerns or secular life.

Noun

contemptus mundi (uncountable)

  1. Contempt for worldly concerns or secular life.

Origin of contemptus mundi

Unadapted borrowing from Ecclesiastical Latin contemptus mundī (literally “contempt for the world”), as used in works such as Bernard of Cluny’s De contemptu mundi. First attested in the mid-19th century in English.

Questions about contemptus mundi

What does contemptus mundi mean?
Contemptus mundi means contempt for worldly concerns or secular life.
What part of speech is contemptus mundi?
Contemptus mundi is a noun.

Words near contemptus mundi in the dictionary

  1. contemptuosities
  2. contemptuosity
  3. contemptuous
  4. contemptuously
  5. contemptuousness
  6. contemptus mundi
  7. contend
  8. contend with
  9. contended
  10. contended with
  11. contendent

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: contemptus mundi (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: “contemptus mundi.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/contemptus_mundi. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.