Word of the Day
: January 13, 2025secular
playWhat It Means
Secular describes things that are not spiritual; that is, they relate more to the physical world than the spiritual world. The word also carries the closely related meaning of "not religious."
// Each year, Ian directed his charitable giving toward secular concerns like affordable housing and arts programming for teens.
// In her autobiography, the actor mentions that her education in parochial school was not so different from that of secular institutions.
secular in Context
"[James] Baldwin eventually left the church, and, although he maintained some of the wonder he gained first in relationship to the theologizing of the church, his aims and orientation became more secular, more humanistic." — Anthony B. Pinn, The Black Practice of Disbelief: An Introduction to the Principles, History, and Communities of Black Nonbelievers, 2024
Did You Know?
You don't need to be a material girl to know that we are living in a material world, but if you're lacking ways to describe our earthly existence, the adjective secular just might be your lucky star. Secular, which comes from the Latin noun saeculum (meaning, variously, "generation," "age," "century," and "world"), has been in vogue since at least the 13th century, at least when there has been a need to distinguish between the sacred and the profane. In some of its earliest uses, secular described clergy who lived "in the world" rather than in seclusion within a monastery. It wasn't that the papas didn't preach, so to speak, but that they did so in churches among the hoi polloi. From there, it took little time for people to express themselves using today's meanings, using secular to describe something related to worldly matters (as in "secular music" or "secular society") rather than something spiritual, or overtly and specifically religious, like a prayer.
