Temple

How to spell temple

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce temple

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does temple mean?

1. nounA building used for the worship of a god or gods.
2. nounThe flat region on either side of the head, between the forehead and the ear.

Temple in a sentence

• The ancient temple drew thousands of visitors every year.

• A dull ache spread from her left temple across her forehead.

• They removed their shoes before entering the temple.

• He pressed two fingers to his temple to ease the headache.

Where does temple come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word arrives in English from the Latin templum, which described a piece of ground or a building marked out and consecrated for religious observance. In its earliest Roman use templum referred to the open area an augur staked out in the sky or on the land for taking the omens, so the core idea was a space set apart for sacred purposes. It passed into Old English as tempel directly from Latin, and was later reinforced by the Old French temple after the Norman Conquest, which helped settle the modern spelling. The anatomical sense, the flat region beside the eye, comes through a separate route from the Latin tempora, the plural of tempus meaning 'time', possibly because that part of the head is where hair first greys with the passing of time; the two words later fell together as identical spellings in English. The single most reliable spelling cue is the ending -ple, mirroring words like 'simple' and 'example', rather than the -pal you might expect from the sound.

How the word is built

• templ- (from Latin templum: a consecrated space)
• -e