laical

variants or laic

Example Sentences

Recent Examples of Synonyms for laical
Adjective
  • Stewart’s switch from his usual snark to imitate Colbert’s buffoonery proved how spiteful and irreligious political humor has become since the left’s worship of Barack Obama and subsequent persecution of President Trump.
    Armond White, National Review, 25 July 2025
  • Silverstein had a much different experience growing up, given the fact that his parents were both Baalei teshuva (irreligious Jews who become more observant later in life).
    Josh Weiss, Forbes.com, 11 Apr. 2025
Adjective
  • Shikaki, who has been tracking Palestinian public opinion for decades, said Barghouti is by far the most popular Palestinian leader and the only secular nationalist capable of winning elections.
    Ivana Kottasová, CNN Money, 8 Oct. 2025
  • The story is based on the true case of the abduction in Israel of a seven-year-old Jewish boy, Yossele Schumacher, by his ultra-Orthodox grandfather in the early 1960s, to prevent him from being raised as a secular Jew by his parents.
    Annika Pham, Variety, 6 Oct. 2025
Adjective
  • Back in 2018, Delbarton publicly acknowledged that at least 30 men had come forward with allegations that, over the course of three decades, they had been victimized by 13 past or current priests and monks at the school — and by a lay faculty member who is now retired.
    Corky Siemaszko, NBC news, 9 Oct. 2025
  • The meaning is not something that a lay person can necessarily intuit.
    John E. Jones III, The Conversation, 5 Sep. 2025
Adjective
  • The History Blog noted that King Knut led campaigns against pagan groups to spread Christianity.
    Maria Mocerino, Interesting Engineering, 12 Oct. 2025
  • By this time, the eastern Roman empire, where Zosimus lived, had been fairly thoroughly Christianized, but Zosimus was a pagan hostile to Christianity.
    Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 10 Oct. 2025
Adjective
  • Predictably, the hubbub surrounding the photo was eventually framed as a war between uptight virgins and godless heathens, with a quieter contingent astounded only by the fact that this kind of marketing could still be so effective.
    Amanda Petrusich, New Yorker, 2 Sep. 2025
  • On the fateful day that inbound Soviet bombers filled the skies above America with godless communism, the horizontal Bomarc missiles would literally become erect, and fire vertically.
    Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 5 Aug. 2025
Adjective
  • Trenton Stewart Stewart was an employee with AES, a firefighter in Waverly and a pastor at a small nondenominational church in the same town called The Log Church, according to his Facebook page.
    Abigail Adams, PEOPLE, 14 Oct. 2025
  • Lannie Tucker from Celebration Community Church, a nondenominational congregation in Fort Worth, helped direct traffic in the parking lot.
    Harriet Ramos, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 6 Oct. 2025
Adjective
  • Most of the scholars Wiese discusses were rabbis, whether more traditional ones or proponents of radical reform, and this reflects the degree to which secular Jewish Studies, housed in nonsectarian universities, took longer to develop.
    Josh Lambert, JSTOR Daily, 19 Sep. 2025
  • The Dalai Lama’s nonsectarian vision and unifying presence has helped Tibetans in exile avoid the fate of many diaspora communities that fall apart from internal strife, tribal loyalties, and turf wars.
    Tenzin Dorjee, Foreign Affairs, 1 Sep. 2025
Adjective
  • This temporal displacement frees Pynchon to offer sidelong commentary on contemporary politics without getting trapped in the flux of the present or being too on the nose.
    Jack Denton, Vulture, 6 Oct. 2025
  • To practice ‘future temporal focused’ networking, create a timetable and ask yourself key questions.
    Sarah Maokosy, Fortune, 4 Oct. 2025
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

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Cite this Entry

“Laical.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/laical. Accessed 15 Oct. 2025.

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