Word.ws English Dictionary

genizah

Syllables: ge·ni·zah/ɡɛˈniːzə/US/ɡɛˈnizə/

genizah noun: a depository where sacred Hebrew books or other sacred items that by Jewish law cannot be disposed of are kept before they can be properly buried in a cemetery.

Noun

genizah (plural genizahs or genizot or genizoth)

  1. (Jewish) A depository where sacred Hebrew books or other sacred items that by Jewish law cannot be disposed of are kept before they can be properly buried in a cemetery.
    • The Cairo Genizah was discovered in 1896.
    • In the year 1870 the Russian Minister of Public Worship purchased from the well-known Karaite traveller and archaeologist Abraham Firkowitsch his collection of Samaritan MSS. for the Imperial Library of St. Petersburg. It consists almost exclusively of fragments, this circumstance arising from the...1874, John W. Nutt, “Appendix I. The Collection of Samaritan MSS. at St. Petersburg.”, in A Sketch of Samaritan History, Dogma, and Literature, Published as an Introduction to “Fragments of a...

genizah meaning in Urdu and Arabic

genizah in Urdu

depository where sacred Hebrew books, etc., are kept before being buried in a cemetery
مدفن

genizah in Arabic

depository where sacred Hebrew books, etc., are kept before being buried in a cemetery
جنيزا

Examples of genizah in a sentence

  • Unfortunately, too, the fragment begins in the very middle of a sentence, as do most of these Genizah fragments.1935 January 15, R[ichard James Horatio] Gottheil, “A Fragment on Pharmacy from the Cairo Genizah”, in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic...
  • A place called a Genizah (from Persian, "ganoz," which means "treasury" or "hidden place") was created to house these ritual objects. […] A genizah, therefore, was a place of concealment.2002, Stephen M. Brown, “Beginning Talmud Torah”, in Stephen Garfinkel, Karen L. Stein, editors, Reclaiming Our Legacy: The More Torah, the...
  • Originally Jewish law required only the words of Scripture to be stashed in genizahs, but over time the understanding of which texts were sacred often became far broader.2016, Mark Glickman, “Loading the Jewish Bookshelf”, in Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books, Philadelphia, Pa.: Published by the...

Forms of genizah

pluralgenizahs
pluralgenizot
pluralgenizoth
alternative formgeniza

Origin of genizah

From Hebrew גְּנִיזָה (g'nizá, “archiving, preservation, storage; hiding; genizah”) (plural גְּנִיזוֹת (g'nizót)), from Old Persian *ganzam, from Old Median *ganǰam (“depository; treasure”).

Words that rhyme with genizah

Questions about genizah

What does genizah mean?
Genizah means a depository where sacred Hebrew books or other sacred items that by Jewish law cannot be disposed of are kept before they can be properly buried in a cemetery.
What is genizah in Urdu?
Genizah in Urdu is مدفن. See Genizah meaning in Urdu.
How do you use genizah in a sentence?
Unfortunately, too, the fragment begins in the very middle of a sentence, as do most of these Genizah fragments.
What part of speech is genizah?
Genizah is a noun.
How do you pronounce genizah?
Genizah is pronounced /ɡɛˈniːzə/ (UK).
What is the plural of genizah?
The plural of genizah is genizahs.

Words near genizah in the dictionary

  1. genius locorum
  2. geniuses
  3. geniuslike
  4. geniusness
  5. geniza
  6. genizah
  7. genizahs
  8. genizas
  9. genizero
  10. genizot
  11. genizoth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: genizah (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-genizah.wav.

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