Word.ws English Dictionary

relicary

relicary is the obsolete form of reliquary.

Meaning of reliquary

Noun

reliquary (plural reliquaries)

  1. A container to hold or display religious relics.
    • “… There is an ivory virgin of the fourteenth century. I once found a buyer for that piece, but the old boy would not sell it.[…]The other piece—the one that concerns us—is known as the Borgia reliquary.”1935, Francis Beeding, “4/1”, in The Norwich Victims
  2. (figuratively) An object that sustains the memory of past people or events.
  3. A person who owes a balance.

Forms of relicary

pluralrelicaries

Questions about relicary

What is relicary the obsolete form of?
Relicary is the obsolete form of reliquary.

Words near relicary in the dictionary

  1. Relic Sunday
  2. relic-monger
  3. relic-mongers
  4. relical
  5. relicaries
  6. relicary
  7. reliced
  8. relicense
  9. relicensed
  10. relicenses
  11. relicensing

Source and license

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