Word.ws English Dictionary

spital

spital noun: a charitable house to receive and care for sick people, later distinguished from a hospital as being especially for those of a low class or meagre financial means.

Noun

spital (plural spitals)

  1. (historical) A charitable house to receive and care for sick people, later distinguished from a hospital as being especially for those of a low class or meagre financial means.
    • Put up a supplication to him in the name of a thousand orphans, an hospital, a spital, a prison, as he goes by, they cry out to him for aid, ride on, surdo narras, he cares not […]1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC, partition II...

Proper noun capitalized: Spital

Spital

  1. A suburb of Windsor, Windsor and Maidenhead borough, Berkshire, England (OS grid ref SU9675).
  2. An eastern suburb of Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England (OS grid ref SK3970).
  3. A suburb in the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral, Merseyside, England (OS grid ref SJ3483).

Forms of spital

pluralspitals
alternative formspittle

Origin of spital

From Middle English spitel, an aphetic form, from Medieval Latin hospitāle.

See spital.

Words formed from spital

Questions about spital

What does spital mean?
Spital means a charitable house to receive and care for sick people, later distinguished from a hospital as being especially for those of a low class or meagre financial means.
What part of speech is spital?
Spital can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of spital?
The plural of spital is spitals.

Words near spital in the dictionary

  1. spit-spot
  2. spit-take
  3. spit-takes
  4. spit-up
  5. spit-ups
  6. spital
  7. Spitalfields
  8. spitalhouse
  9. spitalhouses
  10. Spitalny
  11. spitals

Source and license

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