Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A monument erected in honor of a dead person whose remains lie elsewhere.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. An empty tomb erected in honor of some deceased person; a sepulchral monument erected to one who is buried elsewhere.
- To honor or commemorate with a cenotaph.
Wiktionary
- n. A monument erected to honour the dead whose bodies lie elsewhere; especially members of the armed forces who died in battle.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. An empty tomb or a monument erected in honor of a person who is buried elsewhere.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a monument built to honor people whose remains are interred elsewhere or whose remains cannot be recovered
Etymologies
- French cénotaphe, from Old French, from Latin cenotaphium, from Greek kenotaphion : kenos, empty + taphos, tomb.
Examples
“Over the cenotaph is his bust, and a representation of his first telescope.”
“A cenotaph is a monument erected to the memory of one dead, but not marking the spot in which his remains rest.”
“A cenotaph is a memorial built to one who is buried elsewhere.”
“Near the cenotaph is a marble pillar on which once was set the Koh-i-noor diamond, chief of Akbar's treasures.”
“To be technical about it, that's not his tombstone, it's a cenotaph (A cenotaph is a tomb or a monument erected in honor of a person or group of persons whose remains are elsewhere) as the only thing found of Capt.”
“It wasn't until 1934 that then commissioner Cortlandt Starnes requested that a memorial tablet, later known as the cenotaph, be built to honour regular members who were killed in the line of duty.”
“Mr. Critchlow, being unfamiliar with the word "cenotaph," consulted Worcester's Dictionary, and when he found that it meant”
“= "-- We are told that a cenotaph is a monument" in memory of one buried elsewhere "-- otherwise," an empty tomb. ”
The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers
“cenotaph" and our own, into unimagined aerial spaces.”
“Looking up she notice one of the tiles from the cenotaph missing and realized she was staring at the remains of the letter “Z” from the word “lazy”.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘cenotaph’.
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Gene Wolfe
Please contribute your favorite words from any of Gene Wolfe’s books to this prize-winning list.
In case you come across words in this list which are too commonplace to fit in, please ...gallipot, roost, badelaire, oblesque, execration, dhole, amschaspand, arctother, chalcedony, penitence, asimi, autarch and 839 more...
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Mobying Along
looks like there's not an open Moby Dick list. So now there is.
hypos, Manhattoes, circumambulate, mole, grapnels, bowsprit, asphaltic, mazy, tranced, cataract, ungraspable, judgmatically and 227 more...
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Interesting words
A list of words that are odd or words that I have looked up.
concupiscence, brize, scree, scoria, forestaff, spanaemia, valetudinarianism, distasture, pyrethrum, laudanum, gentian, bicameral and 1073 more...
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Chabon, Michael
A lexicographical taste of his novels.
omniveillant, exophthalmic, loupe, golem, aetataureate, animadversion, termagancy, cuspidor, bombes, viridian, escutcheon, moderne and 6 more...
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Memento Mori
Death and its Words
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Old urban sights
Things you might see in an old city.
chained_bear "My mother says that in Grand Falls he marched, with a bad limp, in the Memorial Day parades to the cenotaph. ... And frequently he woke, bellowing into the night on Junction Road, from nightmares of a horse and a munitions wagon sinking into a sea of mud while ahead of him a trench of defenceless Newfoundlanders shouted for Transport until, one by one, their shouts became strangled gurgles and then stopped."
—David Macfarlane, The Danger Tree, 89 May 6, 2008
seanahan "The pair of young German professors spelunking with their electric torches in the rafters of the Old-New Synagogue, or Altneuschul, had, as it happened, gone away disappointed; for the attic under the stair-stepped gable's of the old Gothic synagogue was a cenotaph".
"The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay", Michael Chabon, p39 Aug 10, 2007