Word.ws English Dictionary

conversus

conversus noun: a lay brother.

Noun

conversus (plural conversi)

  1. (historical) A lay brother.
    • There were again the Novices, who were not all necessarily young, for a conversus passed through a noviciate; and even a monk of another order, or of another house of their own order, and even a monk from a cell of their own house, was reckoned among the novices.1856, Edward L. Cutts, “The Monks of the Middle Ages”, in The Art-Journal, volume 2, pages 342–3
    • The Conversi were, in fact, the servants of the Monks; or, as the chronicler more mildly phrases it, the Monks were the head and the Conversi were the arms of the conventual body.1874, Edmund Sharpe, The Architecture of the Cistercians, volume 2, page 9

Forms of conversus

pluralconversi

Origin of conversus

Borrowed from Ecclesiastical Latin conversus.

Questions about conversus

What does conversus mean?
Conversus means a lay brother.
What part of speech is conversus?
Conversus is a noun.
What is the plural of conversus?
The plural of conversus is conversi.

Words near conversus in the dictionary

  1. conversionless
  2. conversions
  3. conversive
  4. converso
  5. conversos
  6. conversus
  7. convert
  8. convertable
  9. convertance
  10. convertant
  11. convertants

Source and license

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