Pagan

How to spell pagan

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pagan

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pagan mean?

1. nounA person who follows a polytheistic or nature-based religion, or historically one outside the main monotheistic faiths.
2. adjectiveRelating to a polytheistic or pre-Christian religion or its practices.

Pagan in a sentence

• noun

  The museum exhibit traced how an ancient pagan worshipped many gods.

• adjective

  The festival revived several pagan customs tied to the harvest.

• noun

  The historian described the Roman emperor as a pagan who later tolerated Christians.

• adjective

  Archaeologists uncovered a pagan temple beneath the medieval church.

Where does pagan come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin paganus, which originally meant simply 'a country dweller' or 'villager', built on pagus, the word for a rural district or country region. In the late Roman period the same word picked up a second, military sense of 'civilian', someone who was not a soldier. Early Christians, who often spoke of themselves as 'soldiers of Christ', seem to have used paganus for those outside their faith, blending the ideas of the rustic outsider and the non-combatant. English took the word in during the 1300s, by way of Church Latin, to mean a person who was neither Christian, Jewish nor Muslim. The single 'g' and the soft, unstressed second syllable are the spelling's quiet trap, since the ending sounds like a vague 'gun' rather than the 'gan' it is written with.

How the word is built

• pagan- (from Latin paganus: country dweller, villager)
• (the -an ending was already part of the Latin form)