Definitions

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

  • noun Monastic life or practices.
  • noun Monks considered as a group.
  • noun A monastery.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Monasticism, or the practices of monks: generally opprobrious.
  • noun A monastery, or the inhabitants of a monastery.
  • noun The country or rural districts; also, in a collective sense, tramps or vagrants.

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

  • noun The life of monks; monastic life; monastic usage or customs; -- now usually applied by way of reproach.
  • noun obsolete A collective body of monks.

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

  • noun dated, often pejorative the practices of monks; the way of life, behavior, etc. characteristic of monks; monastic life
  • noun dated, pejorative monasticism
  • noun dated a monastery
  • noun dated, collectively monks, considered as a group. (cf clergy, laity)

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From monk +‎ -ery.

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Examples

  • Newbury, it appeared, had spent the preceding night in what Sir Wilfrid obstinately called a "monkery" -- _alias_ the house of an Anglican brotherhood or Community -- the Community of the Ascension, of which

    The Coryston Family A Novel Humphry Ward 1885

  • -- a Minister of ninety almost, a sovereign of whom all that can be said is that he is a great canonist, and all that little bubbling and boiling of priestery and monkery, which is at once odious, mischievous, and contemptible, a sort of extinct volcano, all the stink of the sulphur without any of the splendour of the eruption.

    The Greville Memoirs A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Volume 1 (of 3) Charles Greville 1829

  • I can tell already that you shall go far in monkery!

    Agent Q, or The Smell Of Danger! M. T. Anderson 2010

  • I can tell already that you shall go far in monkery!

    Agent Q, or The Smell Of Danger! M. T. Anderson 2010

  • Accordingly, they began to shout, “To it, fathers — to it I” — “Fight monk, fight madcap — Abbot against Abbot is fair play, and so is reason against unreason, and malice against monkery!”

    The Abbot 2008

  • Álim = one learned in the law, a D.D. Mohammed did his best to abolish the priest and his craft by making each Moslem paterfamilias a pontifex in his own household and he severely condemned monkery and celibacy.

    The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

  • Kazis, who hold that there is no monkery in Al – Islam?

    The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

  • These legends, however, were no more than monkish extravagances, over which one laughed inwardly; there were, besides, priestly matters, and the priestcraft of the book was far worse than its monkery.

    Villette 2003

  • “Here in this old monkery, Lois,” he continued with

    Flappers and Philosophers 2003

  • Thus noble Triboulet tells it us plainly, from whose words we may gather with all ease imaginable that your cuckoldry is to be infamous, and so much the more scandalous that your conjugal bed will be incestuously contaminated with the filthiness of a monkery lecher.

    Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel 2002

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