unfrock

English

Etymology

From un- +‎ frock.

Verb

unfrock (third-person singular simple present unfrocks, present participle unfrocking, simple past and past participle unfrocked)

  1. (transitive) To remove from the clergy; to revoke the clerical status of.
    • 1948 December 19, George H. Sallaway, “Coming—‘Clausmas Day’”, in Our Sunday Visitor, Omaha Archdiocesan True Voice edition, volume XXXVII, number 34, Omaha, Neb., →OCLC, Religious section, page 9, column 3:
      Let’s wake up and oppose this widespread defamation; restore to the feast its significance and grandeur. Shall we permit it to be unfrocked of its glory and transformed essentially into “Clausmas” instead of Christmas?
    • 1952 May, George Santayana, “I Like to Be a Stranger”, in The Atlantic‎[1]:
      Being a provincial priest—at first dressed as a layman, having been unfrocked for his modernism, but afterwards restored to his clerical privileges—he had a traditional admiration for all that was ecclesiastically important.

Synonyms

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.