Fulwiht

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic term for the Christian sacrament of baptism, in which a person is cleansed with water
2. The old English name for the rite of baptism by which a believer is admitted into the Christian faith
3. A historical word meaning the ritual washing with water that marks entry into the church

Etymology: Old English "fulwiht" meant a baptism, and literally "full wight" or "full being," a person made complete by the sacrament. The first element, "ful," is the same word as modern "full," and "wiht" was an Old English word for a creature or a being, the same root that gives us the archaic "wight" and, in a distant sense, "whit" in the sense of a particle of a thing. The word was built on a pattern native to the language: "full" plus "wiht," with the sense that the person was filled up with the Holy Ghost. It was used in Old English religious writing, where it was a common term for the rite of Christian initiation, and it appears alongside related words for washing and cleansing. Its survival was short. After the Norman Conquest, the Latin-derived "baptism" took over, and "fulwiht" fell out of use by the later medieval period, leaving it as a dead term that survives mainly in the study of Old English texts.