Other forms: abbeys
An abbey is the church and the buildings around it where a community of monks or nuns live, pray and work. Stone walls, a covered walk round a square of grass, bells going at hours when nobody else is awake, and a garden somebody has been digging since 1150.
Britain is full of them and most are roofless, emptied in the 1530s and left standing in fields for the sheep. Some are still working communities; others became cathedrals, or country houses that kept the name, which is why Westminster Abbey crowns monarchs and Downton Abbey is a house on television. The head of one is an abbot or an abbess, and that is the distinction worth carrying: every abbey is a monastery, but a monastery only counts as an abbey when there is an abbot or abbess at the head of it.
1nounabbeyThe buildings where a community of monks or nuns live under an abbot or abbess.~73%
“The abbey has stood in that valley since the twelfth century.”
synonyms: monastery, priory
2nounchurchThe church of such a community, or a large church that was once one.~27%
“They were married in the abbey on a wet Saturday in March.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 153 sentences found in the wild and placed 85 of them on a sense (68 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
abbey is a religious house.
Also accepted in games: monastery
ab-BEY → a BEE
You push a heavy wooden door in a stone wall and a bee goes straight past your ear. Inside, the whole garden is bees, and the monks in long brown coats moving between the boxes never once look up.
hooks ontobee
An abbey is named after the man who runs it. Latin abbātia was the office and the household of an abbās — an abbot — and Middle English took it in as abbeye, a convent headed by an abbot. The building has carried his job title ever since. Abbacy is the very same Latin word arriving by a slightly different road.
Ecclesiastical Latin
abbātia
Old French
abaie
Middle English
abbey
English, today
abbey
Built from
From A.D. 1250 in Middle English abbey, abbeye (“convent headed by an abbot”) (compare archaic English abbaye), itself borrowed from Old French abaie, abbaïe, abeïe, abbeie (Modern French abbaye) from Latin - or Ecclesiastical Latin abbātia, from Classical Latin abbās (“abbot”). a doublet of abbacy and Opatija. See abbot.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA