Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Tonsure   Listen
Tonsure

noun
1.
The shaved crown of a monk's or priest's head.
2.
Shaving the crown of the head by priests or members of a monastic order.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Tonsure" Quotes from Famous Books



... the life of a young Siamese and is celebrated by well-to-do parents with lavish expenditure. Those who are indigent often avail themselves of the royal bounty, for each year a public ceremony is performed in one of the temples of Bangkok at which poor children receive the tonsure gratis. An elaborate description of the tonsure rites has been published by Gerini.[231] They are of considerable interest as showing how closely Buddhist and Brahmanic rites are ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... Wolf was leaping up against his legs— uttering low growls of recognition, and making other demonstrations of joy. The animal had identified its old master! Despite the stained snout and close-trimmed tonsure—despite both paint and shears—the dog had been also identified. Between him and his master the recognition was mutual. I saw this at a glance; and the speeches of the squatter only confirmed what was ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... ungodly. Some said he had been a dancing-master before he entered the cloister, and it was no wonder he turned out a renegade and took to trading. Others declared that he had no right to the gray capote, and his tonsure was a natural loss of hair; in fact, that he never had been a friar at all. But in Kaskaskia nobody took him seriously, and Father Olivier was not severe upon him. Custom made his harlequin antics a matter of course; though Indians still paused opposite his shop and grinned at sight of a long-gown ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... to place, proclaiming the good news of deliverance in the towns and villages through which he passed. Soon we find him establishing a Society or Brotherhood; the members of which severed their connexion with all worldly things, handed over their property to the Order, adopted the tonsure and a distinctive dress, and, following the Master's doctrine with strictness themselves, devoted their lives to its propagation. Any member, however, was at liberty to leave the Brotherhood, should he wish to do so. It is noticeable that Buddha's ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.

... the Indians, he wore a garb of dressed deerskin. His face, albeit no stranger to the use of their pigments and unguents, still showed fair and freckled. His hair bore no resemblance to their lank black locks; of an auburn hue and resolutely curling, it defied the tonsure to which it had been for years subjected, coming out crisp and ringleted close to his head where he was designed to be bald, and on the top, where the "war-lock" was permitted to grow, it floated backward in two long tangled ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... parents as securing a wealthy provision for a younger son, but educated by his good tutor with more real sense of his obligations—felt the question in its full import. He was under no vows; he had, indeed, received the tonsure, but was otherwise unpledged, and he was bent on proving all things. The gaieties in which he had at first mingled had become abhorrent to him, and he studied with the earnestness of a newly-awakened ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... according to their own pleasure whatever they choose, in virtue of the declaration, "The Church has forbidden it." Holiness is not that which consists in the estate of monks, priests and nuns,—the wearing of the tonsure and cowl; it is a spiritual word, meaning that there is an inward holiness in the spirit before God. And this is the reason specially why he said this, in order to show that there is nothing holy but that holiness ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther

... to be filed up and smoothed off, and all by one man. The Japanese are but indifferent sewers, all their seams exhibiting numerous "holidays." Pretty children, with their hair clipped around their heads like a priest's tonsure, sport around us, but are not intrusive. Each child has a little pouch attached to his girdle, which, we are informed, contains the address of the child's parents, and also an invocation to the little one's protecting ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... imagined, on the other. Brains were held to be a prerogative of gentle blood, extra intelligence in the lower classes being almost an impertinence. The only exception to this rule lay with the Church. She was allowed to develop a brain in whom she would. The sacredness of her tonsure protected the man who wore it, permitting him to exhibit as much (or as little) of manners, intellect, and morals, as he might ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt

... convocation, synod, consistory, chapter, vestry; sanhedrim, conge d'elire [Fr.]; ecclesiastical courts, consistorial court, court of Arches. V. call, ordain, induct, prefer, translate, consecrate, present. take orders, take the tonsure, take the veil, take vows. Adj. ecclesiastical, ecclesiological^; clerical, sacerdotal, priestly, prelatical, pastoral, ministerial, capitular^, theocratic; hierarchical, archiepiscopal; episcopal, episcopalian; canonical; monastic, monachal^; monkish; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... had been said and written about Buddhism,—enough to frighten priests by seeing themselves anticipated in auricular confession, beads, and tonsure by the Lamas of Tibet,[54] and to disconcert philosophers by finding themselves outbid in positivism and nihilism by the inmates of Chinese monasteries,—the real beginning of an historical and critical study of the doctrines ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller

... directly from the apostles, from whom they had obtained the Gospel and the regulations of the Church pure and undefiled. Thus arose the renowned contest between the early Scottish Church and the rest of Christendom about the proper period of observing Easter, and about the form of the tonsure. Hence, too, arose the debates about the peculiar discipline of the communities called Culdees, who, having to frame their own system of church government for themselves, humble, poor, and isolated as they were, constructed it after a different fashion from ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... this, after a short delay, was granted. But Aimery, who dressed like a layman in 'divided and striped clothes' and wore a long beard, they refused to treat as a clerk, though it was afterwards alleged that the tonsure was plainly discernible upon his head until it was shaved by order of the Capitouls. Aimery was put to the torture, admitted his crime, and was sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out by ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... and the Celtic missionaries, though their life and teaching was in the main the same as that of the Church of Canterbury and of the Churches of the Continent, differed from them in the shape of the tonsure and in the time at which they kept their Easter. These things were themselves unimportant, but it was of great importance that the young English Church should not be separated from the Churches of more civilised countries ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner

... was sufficiently recovered to go out, I proceeded to a barber, and on the plea of continual headache, for which it had been recommended that I should shave my head, requested him to make me a false tonsure. In a few days it was ready, and being very well made, no difference could be perceived between the wig and my own hair, which was then removed. So far I had succeeded; but as the greatest caution was necessary ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat

... stops in front of it. The last strophe of the choral service can be heard from across the courtyard. The CONFESSOR enters from the back; he is dressed in black and white; he has long hair and along beard and a very small tonsure that can hardly ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg

... in religion were no longer thought enough without a good life; and, as the Greeks said, that beard and cloak did not make a philosopher, so the Egyptians said that white linen and a tonsure would not make a follower of Isis. All the sacrifices to the gods had a secondary meaning, or, at least, they tried to join a moral aim to the outward act; as on the twentieth day of the month, when they ate honey and figs in honour of Thot, they sang "Sweet is truth." ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... or in the back of the loose garment; but in both cases the weight is mainly supported by a broad band which passes round the woman's forehead. When men carry them they hold them in their arms. The hair of very young children is shaven, and from about five to fifteen the boys wear either a large tonsure or tufts above the ears, while the girls are allowed to grow hair ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird

... son, hast never seen, and coming hither to France and England, what do we find? Those who have vowed themselves to the service of the Church walking gaily in the dress of soldiers, engaged in carnal matters, letting their hair hang down their shoulders curled and powdered, and thinking scorn of the tonsure, which is the mark of the Kingdom of Heaven. And does not God see? Will He not recompense to His people their sins? Yea, verily He will; and in an hour when they little think it, the wrath of God shall ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... conference, and ordered them to come under his sway and conform to Rome. They hardly knew why, but disliked the idea. Outwardly, their divergence from Catholicism was altogether trivial: they had their own way of shaving their heads for the tonsure, and their own times for celebrating Easter,—though truly, these are the kind of things over which you fight religious wars. However, it was not these details that worried them so much; but an uneasy sense ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... magniloquent. My object is attained if I can but show that when my friend took me under his wing at the Institute long years agone, when the innocent-looking lad with the fair hair, that might have had an incipient tonsure superimposed without incongruity, drifted away from text-books of mechanics, and sat down with Schiller, Ducoudray, and Carlyle, he little imagined how adventurous a spirit there boiled under that demure disguise of retiring scholarship—a ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... or aqueduct, stood the seminary of St. Joseph, where the servants of the church received their education, adopting on their entrance the clerical habit and tonsure. The chapel to the seminary was neat, and we were conducted by a sensible well-informed father of the Benedictine Order to a small ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins

... on the ground round the stove, as close as they could get without scorching, and the atmosphere was quickly heavy with their presence. When they slipped back their hoods it was seen that two of the men wore the "tartar tonsure," after the fashion of ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

... children dying before they are named, or before the tonsure ceremony is performed on them, are buried, and those of other persons are burnt. In the grave of a small child some of its mother's milk, or, if this is not available, cow's milk in a leaf-cup or earthen vessel, is placed. Before a ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell



Words linked to "Tonsure" :   shaving, poll, pate, shave, crown



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com