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prayer

UK/pɹɛə/US/pɹɛɚ/
nounB1Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,801 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: prayers

A prayer is words addressed to a god, spoken or silent. Say a prayer, morning prayer, answer a prayer.

It can be petition, thanks, confession or praise, and the fixed forms — the Lord's Prayer, the five daily prayers of Islam — sit alongside entirely private ones. Not a prayer means no chance at all. Note pray; and that the word comes from the Latin for entreating, which also gives precarious — held only by request.

Howardcorn33 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of prayer

  1. 1nounprayerWords addressed to a god, spoken or silent.B1

    “She said a quiet prayer before the operation.”

prayer is an address to a god.

Where it comes from

Old French preiere comes from Latin precaria, from prex, a request. Precarious, deprecate and pray come from the same asking.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *preḱ-

  2. Latin

    prex

  3. la-eme

    precāria

  4. Old French

    preiere

  5. Middle English

    preiere

  6. English, today

    prayer

From Middle English preiere, from Old French preiere, from la-eme precāria, derived from Latin prex. Displaced native ġebed (whence modern bead).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Belief & Ritual

Practise this word

prayer in the wild

  • The first prayer book, published in 1549 in the reign of King Edward VI of England, was a product of the English Reformation following the break with Rome.

    Book of Common Prayer

  • The 1549 work was the first prayer book to include the complete forms of service for daily and Sunday worship in English.

    Book of Common Prayer

  • The prayer survives in two different versions, however, and the relationship between the Matthean and Lukan forms remains the subject of scholarly debate.

    Lord's Prayer

  • The first-century text Didache (at chapter VIII) reports a version closely resembling that of Matthew and the modern prayer.

    Lord's Prayer

  • The term usually refers to a covered building, but can be any place where Islamic prayers are performed; such as an outdoor courtyard.

    Mosque

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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.