How to Use ossuary in a Sentence
ossuary
noun-
The inspiration is an ossuary, the crypts of the cardinals, of the monks in the 15th century, and the precious decorations.
—Sarah Spellings, The Cut, 31 May 2018
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In the 19th century, many churches again emptied their cemeteries and added even more skulls to this vast ossuary.
—Rick Steves, USA TODAY, 13 Nov. 2019
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The bones were then collected and often placed in stone boxes, known as ossuaries, inside the cave chamber.
—Washington Post, 29 Aug. 2019
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Those remains get moved to an ossuary — a communal residence for bones.
—Steve Rubenstein, San Francisco Chronicle, 5 May 2018
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The rest are stacked in ossuaries inside vaults that have deteriorated over the decades.
—James Badcock, latimes.com, 10 May 2018
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Or bones can be deposited into the cemetery’s common ossuary.
—New York Times, 21 May 2018
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In 2002, an ossuary surfaced in Israel, which appeared to confirm his identity.
—National Geographic, 6 Mar. 2016
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The largest ossuary in the world is the network of catacombs beneath Paris, which reportedly house the bones of approximately six million people.
—Daisy Hernandez, Popular Mechanics, 29 Feb. 2020
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Each columbarium also will have an ossuary, which will hold ashes placed in satin bags in a single underground chamber.
—Mary Divine, Twin Cities, 9 Feb. 2017
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Work on a provisional ossuary – a building where bones of the dead are kept – began in 1920 to provide a sanctuary for the hundreds of thousands of bones that were scattered throughout the Verdun battlefield site.
—Smithsonian, 26 May 2017
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The Liberal Democrats had been consigned to the electoral ossuary as recently as last winter, limping along at around 8 percent in most opinion polls, and discussing bringing in a celebrity leader to raise the party’s profile.
—Parker Richards, The New Republic, 29 July 2019
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But southern Europeans, Mays says, rarely oppose the excavation of human remains, since bodies are typically buried just long enough for them to decay, at which point the bones are removed from graves and placed in ossuaries.
—National Geographic, 7 Apr. 2016
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Gisotti said last week that investigators had located two ossuaries – small chambers where the bones of dead people are placed – under a stone slab manhole covering inside the Teutonic college itself.
—Fox News, 20 July 2019
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'ossuary.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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