Noun: sexton
| Singular | sexton |
| Plural | sextons |
Sample Sentences
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The whole village poured out to gaze on these Asiatic princes, for such the old sexton, who had in his youth been at Moscow and Constantinople, said they were. [1828, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, volume I, London: William Harrison Ainsworth, page 312:]
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on that same night, Mr Haredale, having strongly bound his prisoner, with the assistance of the sexton, and forced him to mount his horse, conducted him to Chigwell [1841 February–November, Charles Dickens, “Barnaby Rudge. Chapter 61.”, in Master Humphrey’s Clock, volume III, London: Chapman & Hall, […], →OCLC:]
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We stopped in the road and watched the sexton shovelling in the new earth. A peasant with a black beard and high leather boots stood beside the grave. The sexton stopped shovelling and straightened his back. The peasant in the high boots took the spade from the sexton and went on filling in the grave [1927, Men Without Women, Ernest Hemingway, An Alpine Idyll:]
Nouns inflected like sexton
soldier's woundwort,
Nicosian,
whopper,
greypate,
tactile sign language,
chronotrope,
Rosie Lee,
dissentient,
photoinactivator,
sulphonediimine,
coastal waterfall,
residuary devise,
bituminization,
nitrosonaphthol,
smṛiti,
geosphere,
backscreen,
mensuralist,
flocculate,
flocculant, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
From Old French segrestien, from Medieval Latin sacristanus, based on Latin sacer (“sacred”). Doublet of sacristan. See: Latin Nouns '
sacer'.