Pastoral

How to spell pastoral

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce pastoral

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pastoral mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the countryside, farming, or an idealised peaceful rural life.
2. adjectiveRelating to the spiritual or personal care a member of the clergy gives to a congregation, or to similar duties of guidance.
3. nounA poem, play, or picture that portrays an idealised version of country life.

Pastoral in a sentence

• adjective

  The cottage looked out over a quiet pastoral valley dotted with sheep.

• adjective

  The vicar set aside two afternoons a week for pastoral visits to the sick.

• noun

  The anthology opens with a sixteenth-century pastoral about lovesick shepherds.

• adjective

  The painting captured a pastoral scene of haymaking in late summer.

• adjective

  The college appointed a tutor to oversee the pastoral welfare of its students.

• noun

  The composer described the third movement as a gentle pastoral inspired by his summer in the hills.

Where does pastoral come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin pastoralis, meaning 'of or relating to shepherds', which was built on pastor, the ordinary Latin word for a shepherd or herdsman. That noun in turn came from the verb pascere, meaning 'to feed' or 'to graze', so at its heart the word is about leading animals out to pasture. English took it up in the fifteenth century, by way of Old French, first to describe the idealised rural life of shepherds celebrated in poetry and painting. The Christian church then borrowed the shepherd image for its clergy, who were imagined as shepherds caring for a flock of people, which is how we get the modern phrase 'pastoral care'. The same pascere root feeds straight into the everyday words 'pasture' and 'pastor', and that shared origin is a useful reminder that the spelling keeps a single 't' and ends in plain '-oral', not the trickier '-orial'.

How the word is built

• pastor- (from Latin pastor: shepherd)
• -al (adjective suffix)