Baptist

How to spell baptist

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce baptist

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does baptist mean?

1. nounA member of a Protestant Christian denomination that practises baptism of believers rather than infants.

Baptist in a sentence

• Her family attended the local baptist church every Sunday.

• As a committed baptist, he supported full immersion at baptism.

Where does baptist come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek baptistes, meaning 'one who baptizes' or 'one who dips', formed from the verb baptizein 'to immerse or wash', itself built on baptein 'to dip'. In the early Christian writings it was applied above all to John the Baptist, the figure who immersed people in the river Jordan, and it passed through Latin baptista and Old French into English in the medieval period. By the seventeenth century the word had taken on a second life as the name of a Protestant movement that insisted on baptizing believers rather than infants. The spelling keeps the Greek 'bapt' stem intact, which is the same root hiding inside 'baptize' and 'baptism', so remembering that family helps fix the 'a' and the 'pt' cluster. The trap for writers is the unstressed ending, since the '-ist' can be mistaken for the '-est' or '-ust' that other words use.

How the word is built

• bapt- (from Greek baptizein: to dip, immerse)
• -ist (one who does, or an adherent)