Other forms: rites
A rite is a set piece of ceremony, done the same way every time because the way it is done is the whole point. A baptism, the last rites said at a bedside, candles lit in a fixed order.
Rite also names a whole tradition of worship — the Latin Rite, the Byzantine Rite — and it reaches past religion to any solemn fixed custom: burial rites, initiation rites, marriage rites. The phrase most people meet first is rite of passage, the event that carries someone from one stage of life into the next: a first job, a driving test, a wedding. A rite is not a ritual: a ritual can be private and self-made, like your coffee ritual, while a rite is laid down by a church or a community. You perform a rite and you observe a rite. And it sounds exactly like right, write and wright, so it is a word to check twice on the page.
1nounriteA religious ceremony performed in a fixed, prescribed way.
“The priest performed the rite exactly as the old book set it out.”
synonyms: ceremony, observance
2nounwholeThe whole body of ceremonies belonging to one church or tradition.
“The wedding followed the Byzantine rite from beginning to end.”
3nounsolemnA solemn custom marking an important event in a community.
“Burial rites differed from one village to the next.”
rite is a ceremony.
Rite comes from Latin ritus, a religious custom or the correct way of doing a thing, reaching English through Old French. Further back sits the Proto-Indo-European root *h₂er-, about fitting parts together in proper order. That is what a rite is: every part in its place, in the same order as last time.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂er-
Latin
ritus
English, today
rite
Via Middle English - and Old French -, from Latin ritus.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA