Saint

How to spell saint

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce saint

What does saint mean?

1. nounA person formally recognised by a church as holy, or more loosely a person of great goodness and patience.

Saint in a sentence

• The cathedral was named after a fourth-century saint.

• After years of caring for her ailing parents, the neighbours called her a saint.

Where does saint come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word goes back to the Latin sanctus, meaning 'holy' or 'consecrated', which was the past participle of the verb sancire, 'to make sacred' or 'to ratify by religious act'. In the early Christian church sanctus came to describe a person of recognised holiness, and the term passed into Old French as saint before English adopted it in the late twelfth century. The same Latin root gives us a whole family of related words, including 'sanctuary', 'sanctify', and 'sacrosanct', all carrying that core idea of something set apart as holy. The silent middle that trips some writers is not really there: the spelling is simply 's-a-i-n-t', and the 'ai' reflects the French vowel that English preserved rather than respelling it phonetically. Over time the word also softened into everyday use for any selflessly patient or virtuous person, which is why we can call a long-suffering friend a saint without any religious meaning at all.

How the word is built

• saint (from Latin sanctus: holy, consecrated); a single unanalysable root in modern English