Vicar

How to spell vicar

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce vicar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does vicar mean?

1. nounA member of the clergy who has charge of a parish, especially in the Church of England.

Vicar in a sentence

• The village vicar led the morning service in the old stone church.

• The couple met the vicar to arrange the date of their wedding.

Where does vicar come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin vicarius, meaning 'a substitute' or 'a deputy', someone who stands in for another. That noun was built on vicis, which meant 'a turn', 'a change', or 'a position held in place of someone else', so a vicarius literally filled in for a person of higher rank. English took the word through Anglo-French and Old French in the early Middle Ages, applying it to a parish clergyman who served in place of the rector or of the church that received the parish's main income. The very same Latin root survives in the modern word 'vicarious', meaning experienced indirectly through someone else, which makes the family resemblance easy to remember. The spelling stays close to its Latin source, and the trap is mainly the unstressed second syllable, which can be heard and written as -er rather than -ar.

How the word is built

• vic- (from Latin vicis: a turn, a change, a stand-in)
• -ar (agent suffix, one who acts)