Pilgrim

How to spell pilgrim

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pilgrim

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pilgrim mean?

1. nounA person who travels to a holy place or shrine as an act of religious devotion.

Pilgrim in a sentence

• Each pilgrim carried only a small pack for the long walk to the shrine.

• The cathedral records every pilgrim who reaches the city on foot.

Where does pilgrim come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin peregrinus, meaning 'foreigner' or 'one from abroad', which was built from peregre, 'beyond the borders', literally 'through the fields' from per ('through') and ager ('field, land'). A traveller in the open country beyond the city walls was thus a peregrinus, and the sense narrowed over time to someone journeying to a holy site. English took the word through Old French pelegrin and peregrin in the 1100s and 1200s, by which point the first 'r' had already softened into an 'l' in a sound shift called dissimilation, giving us the unexpected spelling with no clear root. The same Latin peregrinus survives in the bird name 'peregrine falcon', so called because it was caught while wandering rather than taken from the nest. That hidden 'agr' is also the source of words like 'agriculture', which is a useful reminder that the second syllable is '-grim', not '-gram'.

How the word is built

• pilgrim (from Latin peregrinus 'foreigner'); the modern form shows no productive prefix or suffix, though the buried root agr means 'field' or 'land'