Pilgrimage

How to spell pilgrimage

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce pilgrimage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pilgrimage mean?

1. nounA journey, especially a long one, made to a sacred place or to a site of personal significance.

Pilgrimage in a sentence

• Thousands make the annual pilgrimage to the holy city each spring.

• Her pilgrimage to the composer's birthplace took three days by train.

Where does pilgrimage come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin peregrinus, meaning 'a foreigner' or 'one who travels through foreign lands', built from per ('through') and ager ('field, land'); a pilgrim was literally someone wandering beyond their own fields. This passed into Old French as pelerinage, the act of a pelerin (pilgrim) making a religious journey, and English took it up in the 1200s. The wandering r and l sounds shifted over time, which is why the modern English word keeps that slightly awkward 'pilgrim' shape rather than the older 'peregrine' form. The same Latin root survives in 'peregrine falcon', so named because the birds were caught while migrating rather than taken from the nest. The unstressed middle syllable of pilgrimage is the spelling trap: the -ri- is easy to drop, and the ending is -age, not -idge.

How the word is built

• pilgrim (from Latin peregrinus: foreigner, traveller from abroad)
• -age (noun suffix denoting an action or process)