hieratic
/ˌhaɪ(ə)ˈɹætɪk/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.87 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
4
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Of or pertaining to priests or other religious authorities, especially pharaonic priests of Ancient Egypt.
adj
Of or pertaining to the cursive writing system that developed alongside the hieroglyphic system as its ordinary handwritten counterpart.
Example Sentences
- "In sculpture and in the drama, in Aristophanic farce and in hieratic rituals, in pictorial art and in the stream of literature, the phallus is transcendent."
- "The witch, repository of hieratic lore and folk legends and occult arcana, became the distributor of philtres and unguents, electuaries and pastilles, herbs and charms and incantations - directed toward sexual pleasures and amatory satisfactions."
- "The papyrus was written in hieratic, a cursive form of hieroglyphics."
- "Some of the more hieratic sculptures leave the viewer curiously unmoved."
- "When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country, though the coincidence could hardly have impressed anyone then!"
- "They came in among earth-moving machines, a total absence of trees, the usual hieratic geometry, and eventually, shimmying for the sand roads, down in a helix to a sculptured body of water named Lake Inverarity."
Etymology
From Latin hieraticus, from Ancient Greek ἱερατικός (hieratikós), from ἱερατεία (hierateía, “priesthood”), from ἱερατεύω (hierateúō, “be a priest”), from ἱερεύς (hiereús, “priest”), from ἱερός (hierós, “sacred”). Use pertaining to the Egyptian writing system originates with the Greek phrase γράμματα ἱερατικά (grámmata hieratiká, literally “priestly writing”), which was first used by Saint Clement of Alexandria in the 2nd century AD, as at that time hieratic was used only for religious texts, as had been the case for the previous thousand years.
Origin
- Source language: Latin
Word Breakdown
- Root: hieraticus, ἱερατικός