spiritual

Pluralspirituals

1. 1
   adjective

   Relating to the spirit or the soul, rather than to the body or material things.

   Years of grief led her on a spiritual journey she never expected to take.

   The retreat emphasizes spiritual growth over physical fitness or career success.

   Similarinner

   Oppositematerial, physical, worldly

   Note

   The word is built from spirit plus -ual. It reached English through Middle English and Old French from Late Latin spīrituālis, itself from Latin spīritus. Its core is the inner life as opposed to the bodily one, and it belongs to no single faith: Thai spiritual practice, a spiritual journey or spiritual growth can sit wholly outside the church. When religion itself is the point, the sacred sense is the better fit.

2. 2
   adjective

   Relating to God, religion, or a place of worship; sacred or pure. In Christian use specifically, inspired by the Holy Spirit.

   The congregation gathered for prayer and other spiritual exercises throughout Lent.

   Paul taught that believers are granted different spiritual gifts for building up the church.

   Similarreligious, devotional, sacred, holy

   Oppositesecular, profane

   Note

   Christianity gives the word its most specific use: what the Holy Spirit inspires. That can include people as well as things. The King James Bible of 1611 addresses believers as "ye which are spirituall" and asks them to restore a fallen brother "in the spirit of meeknesse." Spiritual gifts and spiritual exercises carry a religious weight that the inner-life sense does not.

3. 3
   adjective

   Relating to spirits, ghosts, or other supernatural beings and forces beyond the physical world.

   The medium claimed she could communicate with the spiritual world beyond death.

   Local folk tales describe spiritual forces that guard the mountain passes at night.

   Similarsupernatural, otherworldly, unearthly

   Oppositephysical, earthly

4. 4
   adjective

   Consisting of spirit rather than matter; having no physical or material form.

   Descartes argued that the mind is a spiritual substance distinct from the body.

   Angels were traditionally described as purely spiritual beings, having no flesh or physical form.

   Similarimmaterial, incorporeal, bodiless, disembodied

   Oppositematerial, physical, corporeal

   Note

   Here the contrast is with matter itself. The King James Bible of 1611 sets the word against natural: "It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." A spiritual substance or being has no material part at all. Incorporeal is the closest synonym, and it suits a philosophical or theological register. Spiritual keeps the warmer, more religious tone.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   A Christian religious song, especially one in the African-American tradition, or a similar song without religious content.

   The soloist opened the concert with a slow, mournful spiritual.

   "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" remains one of the most widely recorded spirituals.

   Note

   A sacred folk song that began among enslaved African Americans, usually joining Christian words to practices such as call-and-response. Gospel, blues and jazz all grew in its shadow, and the name stretches to similar songs without religious content. Its plural, spirituals, is spelled exactly like the old word for church affairs, though context almost always tells them apart.

6. 6
   adjective

   Relating to the church and sacred matters rather than to lay or worldly affairs; ecclesiastical.

   Medieval clergy answered to spiritual courts rather than to the king's judges.

   The archbishop wielded spiritual authority over the diocese while regents managed its estates.

   Similarecclesiastical, clerical

   Oppositetemporal, secular, lay

   Note

   This sense is defined by what it is not. It names the church's side of a line whose other side is temporal, or secular. The fixed phrase lords spiritual and temporal places the adjective after its noun, an older word order kept in constitutional usage. There the lords spiritual are the bishops who sit in the House of Lords. A spiritual corporation draws the same boundary.

7. 7
   adjective

   Belonging to the mind, and especially to its intellectual and other higher faculties.

   Nineteenth-century educators sought to cultivate a child's spiritual faculties of reason, memory, and imagination.

   He prized spiritual pursuits such as philosophy and mathematics above bodily comforts.

   Similarintellectual, mental

   Oppositebodily, physical

8. 8
   nouncountable

   A function, office, or affair belonging to the church rather than to worldly authority.

   Tithes were reckoned a spiritual and so fell to the church courts rather than the crown's.

   The new bishop assumed charge of the spirituals of the diocese while stewards managed its lands.

   Note

   A noun of ecclesiastical law and history, typically used in the plural and paired with temporals. It draws the same church-and-world line as the ecclesiastical adjective. James Russell Lowell's Dante shows the pairing at work, assigning "supremacy to the pope in spirituals, and to the emperor in temporals." Outside historical or legal writing it is rare.

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