marian
/ˈmɛəɹiən/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.41 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
3
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
A female given name from Hebrew.
adj
Of or relating to the Virgin Mary.
Example Sentences
- "There's no more faith in thee than in a steward prune, nor no more truth in thee than in a drawn fox; and for womanhood, Maid Marian may be the deputy's wife of the ward to thee."
- "a Marian apparition"
- "Marian devotions"
- "When, e.g., Dr. Pusey and others tell him, on à priori grounds, that his constant and unintermitting worship of Mary lessens his simple trust in Jesus, such a statement can only elicit from him amazement and pity; because he knows, as a matter most strictly within his own personal cognisance, that Marian devotion is among his most efficacious helps for growing in the knowledge and the love of God."
- "Like the Mass, the cult of the saints and their shrines was a potent meeting of spiritual and physical: a human being who could be guaranteed as having entered heaven had kept a particularly intense relationship with a place on earth and thus rendered it sacred: sometimes through a relic, perhaps the saint's skeleton or a possession, or simply through association with a holy well or past miracle. A special case was Mary, the Mother of God, for whom there could be no bodily relics, since quite early on, both eastern and western Churches had decided that she had entered heaven in a specially privileged way, with a body that had not experienced the normal pains of death. Characteristically, the West had made sure that this devotional concept was turned into a precise doctrine, that of Mary's bodily Assumption. So although Marian shrines were common throughout Europe, particularly in regions which had bred few native saints, they centred not on a bodily relic (apart from various items of clothing and a remarkably generous number of examples of mother's milk), but instead on a representation of the Virgin's body in the form of a statue. In two famous cases, at Walsingham in England and Loreto in Italy, they went further in exhibiting a replica or transmigrated reconstruction of the Holy House in which the Christ-child had grown up in Nazareth; both these Marian shrines enjoyed an unprecedented boom in the fifteenth century, perhaps reflecting a new interest in seeing family life in the context of the life of the Church."
- "I judge the meaning of it to be, that men who raigne like Lions, Kings and great ones who under the face of men carry the hearts of Tygers; and their Children who equall them in, and inherit their fathers crueltie; and their wives who ſurpaſſe them in Inſolence, and Marian perſecntions;^([sic]) muſt all receive ſuch puniſhments as their ſins deſerve, they end their lives tragically, […]"
Etymology
A variant of Marion, a medieval derivation of Mary, often also interpreted as a contraction of Mary and Ann, or as a variant of Mariana.
Regional Pronunciation
- British English: /ˈmɛəɹiən/