Definition of CRYPT

Did You Know?

Hidden under the main floor of a great church is often a large room, often with a tomb as its centerpiece. Many major European churches were built over the remains of a saint—the Vatican's great St. Peter's Basilica is an example—and instead of having the coffin buried, it was often given its spacious room below ground level. In a large aboveground tomb, or mausoleum, there may be several small chambers for individual coffins, also called crypts; when the comic book Tales from the Crypt made its first appearance in 1950, it was this meaning that the authors were referring to.

Examples of crypt in a Sentence

Noun

the old church's crypt is the final resting place for the president and his beloved wife

Recent Examples on the Web: Noun

Exhuming fragrant old corpses from the crypt isn’t a new development in entertainment, of course. — Joe Queenan, WSJ, "Must Everything Old Be Exhumed Again?," 6 Dec. 2018 The Franco family crypt by Almudena Cathedral is centrally located among the Spanish capital’s tourist hotspots. — Aritz Parra, The Seattle Times, "Franco heirs take upper hand in fight over dictator’s body," 26 Oct. 2018 The entire Almudena crypt, a late 19th century temple conceived as both a burial vault and the cathedral’s foundation, is easily missed by many tourists despite its artistic appeal. — Aritz Parra, The Seattle Times, "Franco heirs take upper hand in fight over dictator’s body," 26 Oct. 2018 Photo: Edu Bayer for The Wall Street Journal Lawmakers are also weighing what to do with the remains of 33,000 civil war victims that fill the Valley’s crypts. — Jeannette Neumann, WSJ, "Spain’s Plan to Exhume Franco Unearths Divisions," 6 Sep. 2018 The most obvious alternative place for Franco’s embalmed corpse is alongside his wife, Carmen Polo, who died in 1988 and who lies in a crypt in the cemetery of El Pardo, Franco’s former residence near Madrid. — Raphael Minder, New York Times, "Plan to Exhume Franco Renews Spain’s Wrestle With History," 7 July 2018 In 1873, the remains were moved to a crypt at Brooklyn’s Washington Park, now known as Fort Greene Park, where they were stored in 22 slate boxes. — Harrison Smith, Washington Post, "‘Turn out your dead!’ In America’s War for Independence, POWs paid a terrible price.," 4 July 2018 Local officials had also kept some records, including a report stating that on April 8, 1959, nine pinewood caskets containing 81 bodies from Calatayud arrived at the Valley of the Fallen and were placed in a crypt inside the basilica. — Matías Costa, Smithsonian, "The Battle Over the Memory of the Spanish Civil War," 28 June 2018 The deaf, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria saved Jews during World War II and her last wishes were to have her remains buried in a crypt below a Russian Orthodox church in east Jerusalem. — Washington Post, "Prince William’s Jerusalem visit highlights unique ancestor," 27 June 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'crypt.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

History and Etymology for crypt

Noun

borrowed from Latin crypta, crupta "covered passage, underground room," borrowed from Greek kryptḗ "underground room," noun derivative from feminine of kryptós "hidden, secret," verbal adjective of krýptein "to hide, conceal," of uncertain origin

Note: The verb krýptein is phonetically and semantically close to kalýptein "to cover, conceal," and the two may have influenced each other. Other forms with which krýptein has been compared, such as Old Church Slavic kryjǫ, kryti "to cover, hide, shroud," Lithuanian kráuju, kráuti "to pile up," are too distant phonetically to allow realistic reconstruction of an Indo-European verbal base. The alternation in consonants between kryp- (in krýptein, kryptós), kryb- (in krýbdēn "secretly"), and kryph- (in kryphêi "in secret," -kryphos "hidden") is apparently the result of both assimilation and analogy.

Combining form

combining form from Greek kryptós "hidden, secret" — more at crypt

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