Hieros

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Of or pertaining to sacred matters or religious practices, often carrying a sense of holiness or divinity
2. Relating to things that are consecrated, revered, or have been designated as sacred, often within a spiritual context
3. Connected to the divine and used in contexts involving rituals, worship, and sacred traditions

Etymology: "Hieros" is the ancient Greek adjective for "sacred," and it stands behind a family of English words that feel far from religion, such as "hieroglyph" and "hierarchy." In Greek it was used of things dedicated to a god, from temples and priests to sacrificial rites, and it appears in the common phrase "hieros gamos," the sacred marriage. The word is ultimately of uncertain origin, and the Greeks themselves do not seem to have agreed on its deeper etymology, so there is no clean root to trace behind it. Its English descendants reached the language through learned coinage rather than everyday speech. "Hieroglyph" comes from Greek "hieroglyphikos," meaning "sacred carving," because Greek writers saw Egyptian script as a sacred writing used by priests. "Hierarchy" combines "hieros" with "archein," to rule, so it literally means rule by sacred persons, a sense that originally applied to the church's ranks of clergy before it spread to any ordered grading of people or things.

Synonyms: holy, sacred, divine

Antonyms: profane, secular, unholy