Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. One who steals bodies from graves in order to sell them for dissection; a body snatcher.
- n. One who brings something back into use or notice again.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. One who makes a practice of stealing bodies from the grave for dissection: also used adjectively.
- n. Hence One who unearths anything from long concealment or obscurity.
Wiktionary
- n. euphemistic A graverobber (a term commonly employed in the 18th and 19th centuries).
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. Slang One who steals bodies from the grave, as for dissection.
Etymologies
- English; resurrection + suffix -ist (Wiktionary)
Examples
“But peering from the window, he saw that the resurrectionist was a dog which already had its teeth in the cloak.”
“As I paraphrase this, JLA is describing the morphology of religious liberalism as "resurrectionist".”
Philocrites: Philip Rieff on charisma, culture, and prophecy.
“The "resurrectionist" scare was at its height then, and the patriarch, who was one of the men in Thrums paid to watch new graves in the night-time, has often told the story.”
“The resurrectionist took the corpse naked, this being in law a misdemeanor, as opposed to a felony if garments were taken as well ”
“Even though I personally suspect keiths will fall to the boring old resurrectionist soul, long before he gets to actual godheads.”
“Things go bad when Nab, Ren, and Tom get into the resurrectionist business, and there are some gruesome and violent episodes.”
“Two that were particularly helpful were The Italian Boy by Sarah Wise, a non-fiction account of a trial of two resurrection men in London, and The Knife Man by Wendy Moore, a biography of John Hunter, who was a famous surgeon and resurrectionist.”
“Some were explicitly resurrectionist -- a god suffers, dies, and is reborn -- but that wasn't the only way the story of springtime could be told.”
“The last case I worked on involved a free-lance resurrectionist.”
“When he was beastliest, he made frequent allusions to the cooling board, referring to a revel, in which, having covered himself with glory, he awoke from a dead drunk to find himself arrayed in his shroud, since which he has been in the habit of designating himself a resurrectionist.”
The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 Devoted to Literature and National Policy
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘resurrectionist’.
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TUH
This is a list of words inspired by Edward Gorey, or a rainy day, or tea in an overgrown garden with topiary shrubs and a sinister fountain. Feel free to contribute.
resurrectionist, urn, lymphoma, galoshes, reservoir, candelabra, deranged, rustle, brass, saltwater taffy, masonry, wallpaper
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Forgotten English 1
jacal, mastaba, lucarne, quoin, triglyph, gargarice, nimgimmer, phrenologize, fleam, eaglestone, toad eater, king's evil and 156 more...
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Defunct professions
Economists like to cite "buggy whip maker" as an example of a profession whose career prospects were dimmed, and ultimately quenched, by the inexorable march of technological progress. This is a li...
buggy whip maker, guillemot egg col..., bog iron hunter, nettle string maker, fuller, purple maker, tanner, gut girl, reddleman, wont catcher, navvy, ratcatcher and 239 more...
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döden
about death in its different forms.
euthanasia, autopsy, post mortem, disinter, rigor mortis, necropolis, requiem, epitaph, exhumation, sepulchre, sarcophagus, terminal burrowing and 60 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for resurrectionist.

sionnach a body-snatcher; graverobber Nov 14, 2008