Protestant

How to spell protestant

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce protestant

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does protestant mean?

1. nounA member of any of the Western Christian churches that separated from the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation.
2. adjectiveRelating to the Protestant churches or their doctrines, which arose from the Reformation.

Protestant in a sentence

• noun

  Raised as a protestant, she attended a small chapel every Sunday.

• adjective

  The town's oldest protestant church dates from the seventeenth century.

• noun

  The historian explained how each protestant rejected the authority of the pope.

• adjective

  Her thesis examined the protestant work ethic and its effect on commerce.

Where does protestant come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word goes back to the Latin protestari, meaning 'to declare publicly' or 'to testify', formed from pro- 'forth, before' and testari 'to bear witness', itself rooted in testis, the Latin word for a witness. Its modern religious meaning was born from a specific historical moment: at the Diet of Speyer in 1529, a group of reforming German princes and cities formally protested against an imperial ruling that aimed to suppress Martin Luther's reforms, and supporters of the Reformation soon became known as Protestants. The term passed into English in the 1530s, carrying both the literal idea of one who protests and the new label for Christians who broke with the Roman Catholic Church. The same testis root survives in everyday words like testimony, testify and protest, which is a useful reminder that the troublesome middle is spelled 'test'. The ending is the agent suffix -ant, the spelling trap most adults stumble over, since the unstressed final syllable sounds identical to -ent.

How the word is built

• pro- (forth, publicly)
• test (from Latin testari: to bear witness)
• -ant (agent suffix: one who)