Tabernacle

How to spell tabernacle

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce tabernacle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tabernacle mean?

1. nounA place of worship, especially a large nonconformist chapel or meeting house.
2. nounA portable sanctuary, or the ornamental receptacle holding consecrated elements in a church.

Tabernacle in a sentence

• The congregation gathered each Sunday at the old stone tabernacle on the hill.

• According to the account, the Israelites carried the tabernacle across the desert.

• The gospel choir rehearsed inside the city tabernacle every evening.

• The priest returned the host to the gilded tabernacle behind the altar.

Where does tabernacle come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin tabernaculum, which literally meant 'a little hut' or 'a small tent'. It was the diminutive form of taberna, a wooden shed or booth, the same root that gives us the everyday word 'tavern'. When the Bible was rendered into Latin, tabernaculum was chosen to describe the portable tent-sanctuary the Israelites carried through the wilderness, and English picked up the term through Old French in the 1200s with that religious sense attached. Over time the meaning broadened to cover any place of worship and, in Christian churches, the ornamental cabinet that holds the consecrated bread. The spelling traps lie in the soft, unstressed vowels: the 'er' in the middle and the '-acle' ending both reduce to a faint schwa in speech, so writers easily drop or swap them.

How the word is built

• tabern- (from Latin taberna: hut, booth)
• -acle (-aculum, diminutive: little)