burial

UK/ˈbɛɹi.əl/US/ˈbɛɹi.əl/

nounC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #3,771 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: burials

A burial is placing a body in the ground. A quiet burial, burial ground, burial rites.

Deliberate burial is among the oldest signs of symbolic thought in the archaeological record, older than writing by tens of thousands of years. Burial rather than cremation is now the minority choice in Britain. Note bury; and that the word was formed from a mistaken plural of an Old English noun.

Definitions of burial

1nounburialPlacing a body in the ground.C1
“The family held a small burial in the village churchyard.”

burial is a rite.

Where it comes from

Middle English biriel was formed from byrgels, an Old English noun mistaken for a plural. Bury comes from the same root.

Old English
byrġels
Middle English
biriel
English, today
burial

Built from

byrġan · Old English — to bury

From Middle English biriel, a backformation from biriels, which was re-interpreted as a plural, itself from from Old English byrġels, from byrġan (“to bury”) + -els. by surface analysis, bury + -al, but originally unrelated to this suffix.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Belief & Ritual

Practise this word

burial in the wild

Funerary art is art produced in connection with burials, including many kinds of tombs, and objects specially made for burial like flowers with a corpse.
Funeral
Robbers entered the tomb twice in the years immediately following the burial, but Tutankhamun's mummy and most of the burial goods remained intact.
Tomb of Tutankhamun
A chamber tomb is a tomb for burial used in many different cultures.
Chamber tomb
Lligwy Burial Chamber is a Neolithic burial chamber in Lligwy, near the east coast of Anglesey, Wales, United Kingdom.
Lligwy Burial Chamber
When an anomalous burial is found in which a corpse or cremated remains have been interred, it is not considered a "jar burial".
Jar burial

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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