sect
Pluralsects
- 1A religious group that has broken away from a larger faith or denomination.
The breakaway sect rejected the bishops and chose its own elders.
Persecution scattered the early sects across the countryside.
Similarfaction, denomination, cult
Note
The word reached English through Old French from Late Latin secta. That word already meant a school or party in philosophy or religion, and it leaned toward heretical doctrine. It may go back to Latin sequi, "to follow", so a sect is defined both by whom it follows and by what it has left behind. The usual pairings are religious sect and breakaway sect.
- 2A group united by devotion to a particular leader or guiding ideal.
The political sect organized around its founder's writings.
Rival sects within the movement fought over the founder's legacy.
Similarfaction, cult, camp, circle, school
Note
Here the bond is loyalty rather than descent. The group need not have split from any parent church; it only has to gather around a leader or a doctrine. In writing of the 1980s and 1990s about groups like the Branch Davidians, it often stands beside cult. Stuart A. Wright's Armageddon in Waco (1995) treats the "apocalyptic sect" as an ideal type. The word's "follow" root is traced at the breakaway religious sense.
- 3In ancient astrology, the polarity that classified each heavenly body as either diurnal (a daytime body) or nocturnal (a nighttime body).
Astrologers determined a planet's sect from whether the chart was cast in daylight or after dark.
Under the rules of sect, the Sun and the Moon governed opposite halves of the day.
Note
A technical term of classical and Hellenistic astrology, and a separate word from the religious one. It sorted the planets into a day group and a night group. Each planet was held to grow stronger when a chart was cast during its own time of day. As a mass noun it usually appears without an article, as in the doctrine of sect or a chart's sect.
Less common meaning
- 4A cutting taken from a plant; a scion used for grafting or propagation.
Note
A gardener's meaning that has dropped out of use: a slip cut from a plant to grow or graft elsewhere. Modern English says cutting or scion instead. A reader who meets sect in this meaning in older writing should not mistake it for a breakaway group, because the religious and factional senses have long since taken over the word.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English secte, from Old French secte (a philosophical or religious sect), from Late Latin secta (a school, party, faction, or heretical doctrine). It possibly derives from Latin sequi ('to follow'), though it may also be linked to sectus ('cut off, divided'), the past participle of secō.