NOVITIATE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does novitiate mean? 

• NOVITIATE (noun)
  The noun NOVITIATE has 2 senses:

1. the period during which you are a novice (especially in a religious order)

2. someone who has entered a religious order but has not taken final vows

  Familiarity information: NOVITIATE used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• NOVITIATE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The period during which you are a novice (especially in a religious order)

Classified under:

Nouns denoting time and temporal relations

Synonyms:

noviciate; novitiate

Hypernyms ("novitiate" is a kind of...):

period; period of time; time period (an amount of time)

Domain category:

faith; religion; religious belief (a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Someone who has entered a religious order but has not taken final vows

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

novice; novitiate

Hypernyms ("novitiate" is a kind of...):

religious person (a person who manifests devotion to a deity)

 Context examples 

With the fortitude of a devoted novitiate, she had resolved at one-and-twenty to complete the sacrifice, and retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

John of Hordle, he thundered, you have shown yourself during the two months of your novitiate to be a recreant monk, and one who is unworthy to wear the white garb which is the outer symbol of the spotless spirit.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

As I shall not have occasion to refer either to her or her sister again, I may as well mention here, that Georgiana made an advantageous match with a wealthy worn-out man of fashion, and that Eliza actually took the veil, and is at this day superior of the convent where she passed the period of her novitiate, and which she endowed with her fortune.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)