Chaplain

How to spell chaplain

8 letters · 2 syllables

The most common mistake is chaplin. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

chaplin chaplain

What people typed instead

• chaplin4 people

How to pronounce chaplain

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chaplain mean?

1. nounA member of the clergy attached to an institution such as the military, a hospital, a prison, or a school.

Chaplain in a sentence

• The army chaplain led a short service before the troops deployed.

• The hospital employs a chaplain to support patients and their families.

Where does chaplain come from?

Language of origin: French

The word travelled into English through Old French chapelain, which came from the Medieval Latin cappellanus. That title literally meant the keeper of the cappella, a word that started out meaning a 'little cloak'. The famous cloak in question was the one said to have belonged to Saint Martin of Tours, a treasured relic kept by the Frankish kings; the small sanctuary where it was housed was called the cappella, and the priest who guarded it was the cappellanus. From the relic came both the building we call a 'chapel' and the clergyman we call a chaplain, so the two words are close cousins from the same cloak. English adopted the word in the 1200s for a priest who served a private chapel, and the sense later widened to clergy attached to the armed forces, hospitals, prisons, and universities. The spelling trap lives in the ending: it is -lain, echoing the Old French -ain, not the -lan or -len that the unstressed final syllable tempts writers to use.

How the word is built

• chapl- (from cappella: little cloak, hence chapel)
• -ain (agent suffix denoting a person)