sanctify

UK/ˈsæŋk.tɪ.faɪ/US/ˈsæŋk.tɪ.faɪ/

verbC12 meaningsVery rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechneutralformal · an editor’s judgement

Other forms: sanctified, sanctifying, sanctifies

To sanctify something is to make it holy. A church is sanctified, a marriage is sanctified, ground is sanctified before anyone is buried in it.

The word is religious first and it stays close to that root: a priest sanctifies, and the noun for the act is sanctification. The second sense is the one you meet in argument, and it is usually a complaint — to sanctify a practice is to treat it as beyond question simply because it has always been done, as in tradition sanctified the arrangement. The related family is large and useful: sacred, sanctuary and saint all come from the same idea of setting something apart.

Definitions of sanctify

1verbholyTo make something holy or set it apart for religious use.C1
“The chapel was sanctified in the fifteenth century.”
2verbsanctifyTo treat something as beyond question or criticism.C1
“Long use had sanctified a fairly silly rule.”

Where it comes from

Sanctify is making holy. Latin sānctus, holy, joins faciō, to make, and the English spelling was later pulled back towards the Latin from the Anglo-Norman seintefier it arrived as.

Proto-Indo-European
*dʰeh₁-
Latin
sānctificō
Old French
saintefier
Anglo-Norman
seintefier
English, today
sanctify

Built from

faciō · Latin — do, make

From Anglo-Norman seintefier, from Old French saintefier, from Latin sānctificō, from Latin sānctus (“holy”) + faciō (“do, make”). Form altered to conform with Latin.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

← Vocabulary