ECCLESIASTICAL

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does ecclesiastical mean? 

• ECCLESIASTICAL (adjective)
  The adjective ECCLESIASTICAL has 1 sense:

1. of or associated with a church (especially a Christian Church)

  Familiarity information: ECCLESIASTICAL used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ECCLESIASTICAL (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Of or associated with a church (especially a Christian Church)

Classified under:

Relational adjectives (pertainyms)

Synonyms:

ecclesiastic; ecclesiastical

Context example:

ecclesiastic history

Pertainym:

church (one of the groups of Christians who have their own beliefs and forms of worship)

 Context examples 

He said, Look at the world, there was good and evil in that; look at the ecclesiastical law, there was good and evil in THAT.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

There are no such things as marble kisses or ice kisses, or I should say my ecclesiastical cousin's salute belonged to one of these classes; but there may be experiment kisses, and his was an experiment kiss.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

“You don't mean to say that there is any affinity between nautical matters and ecclesiastical matters?”

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

It's a little out-of-the-way place, where they administer what is called ecclesiastical law, and play all kinds of tricks with obsolete old monsters of acts of Parliament, which three-fourths of the world know nothing about, and the other fourth supposes to have been dug up, in a fossil state, in the days of the Edwards.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

If the day were half as tremendous to any other professional gentleman in Doctors' Commons as it was to me, I sincerely believe he made some expiation for his share in that rotten old ecclesiastical cheese.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

It arose out of a scuffle between two churchwardens, one of whom was alleged to have pushed the other against a pump; the handle of which pump projecting into a school-house, which school-house was under a gable of the church-roof, made the push an ecclesiastical offence.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)