Parish

How to spell parish

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce parish

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does parish mean?

1. nounA local church district with its own building and clergy, and the community of people who belong to it.
2. nounA unit of local government, used in place of a county in Louisiana and as a small council area in parts of England.

Parish in a sentence

• The new vicar visited every family in the parish within his first month.

• In Louisiana each parish collects its own property taxes.

• Records of births and burials were kept by the parish for centuries.

• The village fell under a rural parish council that met once a month.

Where does parish come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word traces back to the Greek paroikia, meaning a sojourning or a community of resident strangers, built from para 'beside' and oikos 'house or dwelling', so the literal idea was of people living near one another. Greek-speaking Christians adopted it for a local body of believers, and it passed into Late Latin as parochia, where it came to mean the district served by one church and its priest. From there it travelled through Old French paroisse before settling into Middle English by the 1200s. The slightly awkward modern spelling, with the single 'r' and the soft 'sh' ending, reflects that long journey through Latin and French rather than the original Greek 'k' sound. The same oikos root for 'house' also underlies 'economy' and 'ecology', a useful reminder that a parish was first of all about where people made their home.

How the word is built

• par- (from Greek paroikia: a dwelling beside)
• -ish (anglicised noun ending)