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clerisy. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
clerisy, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
clerisy in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word
clerisy you have here. The definition of the word
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English
Etymology
Introduced by Coleridge, based on German Clerisei (modern Klerisei), from Late Latin clēricus.
Pronunciation
Noun
clerisy (countable and uncountable, plural clerisies)
- An elite group of intellectuals; learned people, the literati.
- 2003: By the nineteenth-century clerisy Christianity itself, yoked to material civilization, came to be questioned as gross and vulgar. — Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (Penguin 2004, p. 432)
- 2016: Only the highly educated write so badly. Indeed, the point of such ludicrous prose is to signal membership in a closed clerisy that possesses a private language. — George F. Will, Washington Post, 18 Nov, 2016
- 2022: We invent ourselves as American writers—it's not a clerisy we’re born into... — Edward Hirsch, The Heart of American Poetry (Library of America, 2022)
- The clergy, or their opinions, as opposed to the laity.
1986, Kenneth Rexroth, Bradford Morrow, Classics Revisited, page 174:Few men have ever had a stronger conviction of their clerisy, of their belonging to the clerkly caste of the responsibles.
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