Sepulchre

 WORD OF THE DAY

sepulchre / noun / SEP-ul-ker

Definition
1a: a place of burial
1b: tomb
2: a receptacle for religious relics especially in an altar
3a (archaic): to place in or as if in a sepulchre
3b (archaic): bury
4 archaic : to serve as a sepulchre for

Example
“Unlike the Romans, though, for some 3,000 years of their history what the Egyptians mostly left behind was tombs. A pyramid is a sepulchre for the rich and powerful, but they liked to be buried with their possessions—so it’s also a gigantic ‘X marks the spot.’ The sands and cities of Egypt are riddled with three millennia of buried treasure...”
— Christopher Hart, The Daily Mail (London), 1 Sept. 2022

The Garden Tomb, is believed by many to be the garden and sepulchre of Joseph of Arimathea, and therefore a possible site of the resurrection of Jesus.
— Joe Yudin, Town & Country, 5 Oct. 2016

Did You Know?
The history of sepulchre is a grave tale.
The earliest evidence in our files traces sepulchre (also spelled sepulcher) back to Middle English around the beginning of the 13th century.
It was originally spelled sepulcre, as it was in Anglo-French.
Like many words borrowed into English from French, sepulchre has roots buried in Latin; in this case the root is sepelire, a verb meaning “to bury.”
Sepultus, the past participle of sepelire, gave us—also by way of Anglo-French—the related noun sepulture, a synonym of burial and sepulchre, but one whose contemporary use is much rarer