SEMINARY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does seminary mean? 

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

1. a private place of education for the young

2. a theological school for training ministers or priests or rabbis

  Familiarity information: SEMINARY used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• SEMINARY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A private place of education for the young

Classified under:

Nouns denoting groupings of people or objects

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

private school (a school established and controlled privately and supported by endowment and tuition)

Derivation:

seminarist (a student at a seminary (especially a Roman Catholic seminary))

Sense 2

Meaning:

A theological school for training ministers or priests or rabbis

Classified under:

Nouns denoting groupings of people or objects

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

religious school (a school run by a religious body)

Derivation:

seminarist (a student at a seminary (especially a Roman Catholic seminary))

 Context examples 

Had a lively time in my seminary this morning, for the children acted like Sancho, and at one time I really thought I should shake them all round.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

They were rather handsome, had been educated in one of the first private seminaries in town, had a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, were in the habit of spending more than they ought, and of associating with people of rank, and were therefore in every respect entitled to think well of themselves, and meanly of others.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

Miss Temple, through all changes, had thus far continued superintendent of the seminary: to her instruction I owed the best part of my acquirements; her friendship and society had been my continual solace; she had stood me in the stead of mother, governess, and, latterly, companion.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Mrs. Goddard was the mistress of a School—not of a seminary, or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality, upon new principles and new systems—and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity—but a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way, and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

The palace of a chief minister is a seminary to breed up others in his own trade: the pages, lackeys, and porters, by imitating their master, become ministers of state in their several districts, and learn to excel in the three principal ingredients, of insolence, lying, and bribery.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Saturday afternoons are riotous times, whether spent in the house or out, for on pleasant days they all go to walk, like a seminary, with the Professor and myself to keep order, and then such fun!

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

That forest-dell, where Lowood lay, was the cradle of fog and fog-bred pestilence; which, quickening with the quickening spring, crept into the Orphan Asylum, breathed typhus through its crowded schoolroom and dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into an hospital.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)