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English philosopher-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) believed that if humanity was to flourish, it was necessary to create a secular organization of learned individuals, "whether poets, or philosophers, or scholars" to "diffuse through the whole community … that quantity and quality of knowledge which was indispensable." Coleridge named this hypothetical group the clerisy, a term he adapted from Klerisei, a German word for clergy (in preference, it seems, to the Russian term intelligentsia which we borrowed later, in the early 1900s). Coleridge may have equated clerisy with an old sense of clergy meaning "learning" or "knowledge," which by his time was used only in the proverb "an ounce of mother wit is worth a pound of clergy."
Examples of clerisy in a Sentence
Matthew Continetti, National Review, 24 Sep. 2022
Democrats and the public-health clerisy denounced President Trump for rushing Covid vaccines.
—Allysia Finley, WSJ, 4 Sep. 2022
Only those the board licenses are admitted to the clerisy uniquely entitled to publicly discuss engineering.
—George Will, Twin Cities, 13 June 2017
Cite this Entry
“Clerisy.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/clerisy. Accessed 15 Sep. 2025.
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