Cult

How to spell cult

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cult

What does cult mean?

1. nounA relatively small religious or social group with beliefs or practices regarded as strange, often centred on a charismatic leader.
2. nounA devoted and enthusiastic following for a particular person, product, or work, especially a niche one.

Cult in a sentence

• The documentary investigated how the cult recruited vulnerable members.

• The strange little film flopped at first but later gained a devoted cult following.

• Families spent years trying to free relatives from the cult.

• The obscure band built a small but loyal cult over the years.

Where does cult come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin cultus, which meant 'care', 'tilling', or 'worship', and was the past participle form of the verb colere, meaning 'to till the soil', 'to tend', or 'to honour'. The original sense was agricultural, the careful tending of land, but the same idea of devoted attention naturally extended to the careful tending of the gods, giving the religious meaning of ritual worship. English took the word in the early 1600s by way of French culte, first in the sense of a system of religious devotion. Over time it narrowed to describe a small, often unorthodox group with intense devotion to a person or idea, and only later picked up the lighter modern sense of an enthusiastic following, as in a cult film. The same colere root sits inside the everyday words 'cultivate', 'culture', and 'agriculture', all of which keep the idea of tending or caring for something.

How the word is built

• cult (from Latin cultus: care, worship, cultivation)