Sidesman

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A lay officer of a church who helps the churchwardens with duties such as showing worshippers to their seats and taking up the collection
2. An assistant in a parish church who ushers congregants to pews and gathers the offerings during services
3. A church helper, chosen to assist the wardens, who seats the congregation and handles the collection plate

Etymology: The word is a worn-down form of "synod's man," meaning a man who belonged to a synod, which is a church assembly. Over the centuries the phrase was clipped and reshaped by ordinary speakers until the older sense of its parts was lost, and the result looks like a plain compound of "side" and "man." The sidesman's role of showing people to their seats and handling the collection in church is the job the word has kept, even though nothing about the word itself now points to a synod. Because the spoken form was altered by everyday usage rather than by any deliberate coinage, the change is a matter of sound and habit. A reader who meets "sidesman" in a parish notice would never guess its origin from the spelling alone, which is the surprising part: the modern word carries no visible trace of the church assembly it was named after.