Glossary

These are the words you'll meet in and around an Orthodox church, from the parking lot to coffee hour, and every word this guide sets in bold. The definitions are kept to a line or two. The entry named beside each one does the explaining.

How to read the columns. The Term is spelled the way the rest of this guide spells it, which is the way a parish bulletin does: plain letters, no accents. Other names for the same thing follow in parentheses. Transliteration gives the main original form, usually the Greek, letter for letter: rough breathing as h, υ as y, χ as ch, η and ω as plain e and o, and an accent on the stressed syllable. It shows the spelling, not the modern sound, so βῆμα is béma here and VEE-ma in a Greek parish. Pronunciation is an English respelling with the stressed syllable in capitals, as the word is said in American parishes; where Greek and Slavic parishes say it differently, both are given, and the Pronunciation Guide collects the commonest forty or so. Entry links to the page that explains the word. Forms gives the Greek, the Church Slavonic and the Arabic, in that order and separated by a dot, each in its own script and then romanized. Slavonic is romanized one way throughout (zh, kh, ts, ch, sh, shch; y for both ы and й; an apostrophe for the soft sign), and "(Russ.)" marks an everyday Russian word where the service books say something else. An empty cell means no form is given. We print only the forms we could confirm, which is why some rows have Greek and nothing else; a blank is an honest blank, not a claim that the word doesn't exist.