Churched

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Brought a woman to a religious service for a blessing after she had given birth ; subjected a person to censure or discipline imposed by a religious body
2. Took a new mother to a service of thanksgiving after childbirth ; put someone under the disciplinary authority of a religious community
3. Led a woman to a ceremony of blessing following delivery of a child ; placed a person under formal religious censure or ecclesiastical discipline

Etymology: The verb "churched" is simply the past tense and past participle of "church", so its story is really the story of the noun. That noun begins in ancient Greek with "kuriakón", the neuter form of an adjective meaning "belonging to the lord," built on "kúrios", "ruler" or "lord." Early Christians in the Greek-speaking East used it for buildings set aside for worship, though it competed with the more common "ekklēsía", meaning "congregation," and it was not the dominant term. The word travelled north into Germanic speech, probably through the Goths, and became the root of Old English "ċiriċe", which is the ancestor of modern "church." The same borrowing gave Scots "kirk", and it spread to Dutch "kerk", German "Kirche" and Scandinavian "kyrka" and "kirke". The Slavic languages took it too, by way of Old High German, which is why Russian has "cérkovʹ". Meanwhile, the Romance and Celtic languages drew on Latin "ecclēsia" instead, so the two families of Christian vocabulary in Europe have different roots.