secular

Pluralseculars

1. 1
   adjective

   Not specifically religious; relating to civil or lay life rather than to the church or clergy.

   The new constitution established a secular state separate from any official religion.

   Many secular charities provide aid without promoting religious beliefs.

   Similarnonreligious, civil, lay, temporal

   Oppositereligious, sacred, ecclesiastical, spiritual

2. 2
   adjective

   Worldly or temporal; concerned with the present world rather than with eternal or timeless things.

   The poem contrasts secular ambition with the soul's eternal longing.

   Medieval thinkers often ranked secular pursuits below spiritual ones.

   Similarworldly, temporal, earthly, mundane

   Oppositespiritual, eternal, sacred, heavenly

   Note

   Here the word stays closest to its Latin source: saeculāris meant "of the age," from saeculum. It reached English through Old French seculer and Middle English seculer. What belongs to an age belongs to passing time rather than to eternity, which is why this sense usually appears in a contrast, with secular set against spiritual, sacred or eternal.

3. 3
   adjective

   Continuing or persisting over a long period of time; long-term.

   Analysts described a secular decline in newspaper circulation across the decade.

   The region experienced secular population growth lasting generations.

   Similarlong-term, sustained, persistent, prolonged, enduring

   Oppositecyclical, short-term, temporary, transient

   Note

   An economist's word for the long haul. A secular trend or secular shift is one that persists beneath shorter cyclical ups and downs. It sits naturally beside trend, shift, decline and growth, and in the phrase on a secular basis. Outside economics, a secular decline can be misheard as something to do with religion. In financial writing it simply means long-run as opposed to cyclical.

4. 4
   adjective

   Of a member of the clergy, not bound by the vows or rule of a monastic order.

   Secular canons administered the cathedral without taking monastic vows.

   The bishop ordained several secular priests for the rural parishes.

   Similardiocesan

   Oppositeregular, monastic

   Note

   A church term that surprises newcomers, because secular clergy are still clergy. The word separates priests who serve out in the world from those bound by the vows of a monastic order, known as regular clergy. A secular priest is therefore not lay in the way the everyday "non-religious" meaning suggests. The word marks a life outside the cloister, not outside the church, as in the phrase secular clergy in Catholicism.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   A layperson, as distinguished from a member of the clergy.

   The chapter admitted no secular to its private deliberations.

   A secular could not perform the rites reserved for ordained priests.

   Similarlayperson, layman

   Oppositecleric, clergyman

   Note

   A use that sits awkwardly beside the secular priest. The same noun can name a cleric who lives outside the cloister or a layperson who is outside the clergy altogether. Only context tells the two apart. In writing about the church, it is clearer to say layperson or layman when that is what you mean.

6. 6
   nouncountable

   A member of the clergy not bound by monastic rules; a secular ecclesiastic.

   The cathedral was staffed by seculars rather than members of an order.

   A secular might own property that a monk's vows forbade.

   Oppositeregular

   Note

   The adjective has turned into a noun for a person: a secular is a priest who lives outside the cloister. The word is clearest when set beside its counterpart, as in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): "I include the seculars, and the regulars of both sexes." The pairing makes sense once you know the background of secular clergy.

7. 7
   adjective

   Occurring once in an age, or once in a century.

   The emperor revived the secular games to mark the dawn of a new age.

   A secular rite of this kind recurred only at the turn of each century.

   Similarcentennial

   Note

   The secular games of ancient Rome show this sense at work. They were held to close one saeculum and open the next, the Latin "age" traced under the "worldly" sense. Modern readers hear the "non-religious" meaning first, so the name can look puzzling. Here secular simply means "belonging to the turn of an age," and the context of Roman history usually makes that clear.

8. 8
   adjectiveliterary

   Having existed for centuries; age-old, ancient.

   The poet wandered among secular forests untouched since antiquity.

   Secular stones marked the boundary long before the village had a name.

   Similarancient, age-old, venerable, primeval

   Oppositenew, young, recent

   Note

   A literary use that gives the word its age rather than its worldliness. In Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" (1899), a steamer slips past river bends lined with "secular trees," meaning trees centuries old. Modern readers can easily take the word as "non-religious," so it works best where age is unmistakable from the context, such as beside forests, stones or ruins.

9. 9
   adjective

   Concerned with slow, long-term deviations that do not recur in regular cycles, especially in the motion of planets or in a magnetic field.

   The secular variation of the geomagnetic field is mapped by observatories worldwide.

   Astronomers model the secular perturbations that slowly reshape the asteroid's orbit.

   Similarlong-term

   Oppositeperiodic

   Note

   In astronomy and geophysics, secular is the opposite of periodic. A secular change keeps moving in one direction instead of cycling back. E. T. Jaynes's Probability Theory (2003) recalls how Laplace showed that Jupiter's drift was not secular after all, because the observations had covered only part of a cycle. In geophysics, the set phrase is the secular variation of Earth's magnetic field.

10. 10
    adjective

    Remaining unperturbed, or stable, over time.

    In the secular limit, the fast oscillations average out and the populations stay constant.

    Physicists treat the system as secular when its slow variables dominate.

    Note

    Spectroscopists use the word for the part of an interaction that holds steady while faster terms average away. S. A. Dikanov's work on ESEEM spectroscopy (2000) splits the hyperfine interaction into secular and nonsecular parts, and the word often travels with that opposite. It is close in spirit to the astronomer's long-term sense, but there secular means slow drift, while here it means stability.

11. 11
    nouncountable

    A church official whose duties are limited to singing in the choir.

    The cathedral employed a secular solely to strengthen the choir's voices.

    A secular held no duty beyond singing the daily offices.

    Similarchorister

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