Other forms: temples
A temple is a building people worship in — the stone ones with columns in Greece, the gold-roofed ones in Thailand, the Hindu and Sikh ones on an ordinary British street. Shoes off at the door, quiet inside.
Not every place of worship is a temple: Christians say church, Muslims say mosque, and Jewish congregations say synagogue or temple depending on where they are. Your temples are also the flat sides of your head just in front of your ears — you rub them when your head aches, and a doctor feels for a pulse there. Two unrelated Latin words landed on the same English spelling, which is why one word covers a shrine in Kyoto and the side of your face.
1nountempleA building used for worship, especially in Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jewish and ancient religions.~97%
“They left their shoes at the temple door.”
2nounflatThe flat part on each side of your head, above and in front of the ear.~3%
“He pressed his fingers to his temples and shut his eyes.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 171 sentences found in the wild and placed 105 of them on a sense (66 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
temple is a place of worship.
Two different Latin words came into English as one. The building is templum, a shrine — and first of all a patch of ground or sky marked off for reading signs. The side of your head is tempora, the plural of tempus, the head or the face. A third templum, the name of a small timber in a weaver's frame, sits behind the English word template.
Proto-Indo-European
*temh₁-
Latin
templum — shrine, temple, area for auspices
Old English
templ
Middle English
temple
English, today
temple
From Middle English temple, from Old English templ, tempel, borrowed from Latin templum (“shrine, temple, area for auspices”). Compare Old High German tempal (“temple”), also a borrowing from the Latin. Displaced native Old English ealh.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA