Word of the Day:
churchyard
What It Means
A patch of land adjoining a church, often used as a graveyard.
Churchyard in Context
“Ayot St Lawrence's most famous inhabitant, George Bernard Shaw, moved into the New Rectory in 1906 because, it is said, of a gravestone epitaph in the churchyard. This recorded the death of a woman who lived to be 70 with the comment 'Her time was short'. Shaw thought that a place that considered a...”
Did You Know?
Inherited from Middle English chircheyerd (also kirkeyerd > English kirkyard), equivalent to church + yard. Compare also Middle English kurk-garth, kyrkgarth, kirrkegærd, from Old Norse kirkjugarðr (“churchyard; graveyard”). Replaced Middle English chirchetoun from Old English ċirictūn (churchtown).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: churchyard (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “churchyard.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/churchyard. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.