cloister

UK/ˈklɔɪstə/US/ˈklɔɪstɚ/

nounC2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,500 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: cloisters

A cloister is a covered walk in a monastery, or a sheltered life. The cloister garden.

The four walks enclose a square of open ground, which is where the monks actually worked. To be cloistered is the figurative use and means shut away from ordinary life.

Definitions of cloister

1nouncloisterA covered walk in a monastery, or a sheltered life.C2
“The cloister was the only part of the abbey still standing.”

cloister is a walk.

Remember it

The Latin is claudere, to close, and it is the close you already know. A cloister is the walk inside walls that close the world out.

hooks ontoclose

Where it comes from

Old French cloistre comes from Latin claustrum, an enclosed place, from claudere, to close.

Proto-Indo-European
*(s)kleh₂w-
Latin
claustrum — place shut in, bar, bolt, enclosure
Medieval Latin
claustrum — portion of monastery closed off to laity
Old English
clauster
Old French
cloistre
Middle English
cloistre
English, today
cloister

Built from

claudere · Latin — to close

Recorded since about 1300 as Middle English cloistre, borrowed from Old French cloistre, clostre, or via Old English clauster, both from Medieval Latin claustrum (“portion of monastery closed off to laity”), from Latin claustrum (“place shut in, bar, bolt, enclosure”), a derivation of the past participle of claudere (“to close”). a doublet of claustrum.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

cloister in the wild

A cloister vault is a square domical vault, a kind of vault with a polygonal base.
Cloister vault
Of the original Romanesque edifice, only the 12th-century cloister and a bell tower remain.
Girona Cathedral
The church features a tympanum, and the cloister a 15th-century "mise au tombeau".
Carennac
The plot of the poem centers around the speaker's hatred for "Brother Lawrence", a fellow monk in the cloister.
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
The cloister is all that is left of a monastery complex built in the late 16th and early 17th century by the Mercedarian order.
Convent of La Merced, Mexico City

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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.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

the cloistre family

cloister cloistered

cloister — used about once every 6,499 pages · #10,500 · point at the bar for the others

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