Word.ws English Dictionary

sign of the cross

sign of the cross noun: a gesture of the hand moving over the front of one's body, or over an object, in the shape of a cross made as part of ritual or to invoke divine protection.

Noun (1)

sign of the cross (plural signs of the cross)

  1. A gesture of the hand moving over the front of one's body, or over an object, in the shape of a cross made as part of ritual or to invoke divine protection.
    • If a morsel of food fell off your plate, the advice of one contemporary document was to pick it up, make the sign of the cross over it, season it well - and then eat it. The sign of the cross was the antiseptic of the year 1000.1999, Robert Lacey, Danny Danziger, The Year 1000: What life was like at the turn of The First Millennium, London: Abacus, published 2000, page 122

Noun (2) capitalized: sign of the Cross

sign of the Cross (plural signs of the Cross)

  1. (alternative) Alternative form of sign of the cross.

sign of the cross meaning in Tagalog and Vietnamese

sign of the cross in Tagalog

gesture
antanda

sign of the cross in Vietnamese

gesture
dấu Thánh Giá

Forms of sign of the cross

pluralsigns of the cross
alternative formsign of the Cross
pluralsigns of the Cross

Origin of sign of the cross

A calque translation of Latin signum crucis.

Questions about sign of the cross

What does sign of the cross mean?
Sign of the cross means a gesture of the hand moving over the front of one's body, or over an object, in the shape of a cross made as part of ritual or to invoke divine protection.
What is sign of the cross in Tagalog?
Sign of the cross in Tagalog is antanda. See Sign of the cross meaning in Tagalog.
What part of speech is sign of the cross?
Sign of the cross is a noun.
What is the plural of sign of the cross?
The plural of sign of the cross is signs of the cross.

Words near sign of the cross in the dictionary

  1. sign manual
  2. sign name
  3. sign names
  4. sign of contradiction
  5. sign of life
  6. sign of the cross
  7. sign of the horns
  8. sign of the times
  9. sign of the zodiac
  10. sign off
  11. sign offs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sign of the cross (page history and authors); sign of the Cross (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-sign of the cross.wav.

Cite this entry: “sign of the cross.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sign_of_the_cross. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.