Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A recluse or hermit, especially a religious recluse.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun One who lives in a wilderness or in retirement; a hermit.
  • noun Specifically In church hist., in the earlier period, a Christian who, to escape persecution, fled to a solitary place, and there led a life of contemplation and asceticism.
  • noun Synonyms See anchoret.
  • Eremitic.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A hermit.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A hermit; a religious recluse, someone who lives alone.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a Christian recluse

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Late Latin erēmīta; see hermit.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Late Latin eremita, from Ancient Greek ἐρημίτης (erēmitēs), from ἐρημία (erēmia, "desert"), from ἐρῆμος (erēmos, "uninhabited").

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Examples

  • A Gentleman refers to Cordelia in eremite terms: she "redeems inlet from a ubiquitous curse" of sinfulness so dramatically demonstrated in Lear's elder daughters.

    Philadelphia Reflections: Shakspere Society of Philadelphia admin 2009

  • A Gentleman refers to Cordelia in eremite terms: she "redeems inlet from a ubiquitous curse" of sinfulness so dramatically demonstrated in Lear's elder daughters.

    Archive 2009-11-01 admin 2009

  • The story or a part of it is told by a fellow-seaman of Columbus, who had turned "eremite" in his old age, and though the narrative itself is in heroic verse, the prologue and epilogue, as they may be termed, are in

    The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 3 George Gordon Byron Byron 1806

  • Even the increasingly rare eremite, the desert dweller, regularly leaves his bleak and rugged cave, trekking to the monastic enclave or his neighbor's chapel for the purpose of liturgical worship and communion.

    Scott Cairns: The Christian and the Community: A Relationship in God's Image Scott Cairns 2010

  • Even the increasingly rare eremite, the desert dweller, regularly leaves his bleak and rugged cave, trekking to the monastic enclave or his neighbor's chapel for the purpose of liturgical worship and communion.

    Scott Cairns: The Christian and the Community: A Relationship in God's Image Scott Cairns 2010

  • Where was a dignified predicament any a singular faced, a eremite visualisation Macbeth felt with such agony in a play's late scenes?

    Archive 2009-11-01 admin 2009

  • Where was a dignified predicament any a singular faced, a eremite visualisation Macbeth felt with such agony in a play's late scenes?

    Philadelphia Reflections: Shakspere Society of Philadelphia admin 2009

  • The eremite acts alone and has reasons you will understand later.

    Richard Hartz writes under the pseudonym of Angiras Tusar N Mohapatra 2009

  • The eremite acts alone and has reasons you will understand later.

    Archive 2009-06-01 Tusar N Mohapatra 2009

  • He had lived a retired and peaceful existence, mainly a spectator at the feast, as little occupied in helping himself to the dishes which he saw others enjoy as is an eremite in the desert in plucking the grape-clusters of his dreams.

    Henrik Ibsen 2008

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  • But long ere scarce a third of his passed by,

    Worse than adversity the Childe befell;

    He felt the fulness of satiety:

    Then loathed he in his native land to dwell,

    Which seemed to him more lone than eremite’s sad cell.

    Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

    May 30, 2009

  • "A French monk at the abbey of Ligugé argued that the rules developed for Eastern ascetics did not apply with the same force to a Frenchman, because, well, the French are different: 'That a Cyrenean can bear to eat nothing but cooked herbs and barley bread is because nature and necessity have accustomed him to eating nothing.' What was true of an Eastern eremite did not suit French conditions: 'We Gauls, we cannot live like angels.'"

    --Jack Turner, _Spice: The History of a Temptation_ (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 278

    December 6, 2016