Word.ws English Dictionary

lay-brother

lay-brother is the archaic form of lay brother.

Meaning of lay brother

Noun

lay brother (plural lay brothers or lay brethren)

  1. A layman who is a member of a religious congregation or monastic order without the intention to become a priest.
    • In feudal days lay brothers were usually uneducated commoners, who did most menial, manual labor while the learned priestly monks held the more spiritual jobs.
    Synonyms:
    conversus

Forms of lay-brother

plurallay-brothers
plurallay-brethren

Questions about lay-brother

What is lay-brother the archaic form of?
Lay-brother is the archaic form of lay brother.

Words near lay-brother in the dictionary

  1. lay vicar
  2. lay vicars
  3. lay waste
  4. lay with
  5. lay-brethren
  6. lay-brother
  7. lay-brothers
  8. lay-by
  9. lay-bye
  10. lay-byes
  11. lay-bys

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lay-brother (page history and authors); lay brother (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: “lay-brother.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/lay-brother. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.