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Cloister   /klˈɔɪstər/   Listen
noun
Cloister  n.  
1.
An inclosed place. (Obs.)
2.
A covered passage or ambulatory on one side of a court; (pl.) The series of such passages on the different sides of any court, esp. that of a monastery or a college. "But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloister's pale."
3.
A monastic establishment; a place for retirement from the world for religious duties. "Fitter for a cloister than a crown."
Cloister garth (Arch.), the garden or open part of a court inclosed by the cloisters.
Synonyms: Cloister, Monastery, Nunnery, Convent, Abbey, Priory. Cloister and convent are generic terms, and denote a place of seclusion from the world for persons who devote their lives to religious purposes. They differ is that the distinctive idea of cloister is that of seclusion from the world, that of convent, community of living. Both terms denote houses for recluses of either sex. A cloister or convent for monks is called a monastery; for nuns, a nunnery. An abbey is a convent or monastic institution governed by an abbot or an abbess; a priory is one governed by a prior or a prioress, and is usually affiliated to an abbey.


verb
Cloister  v. t.  (past & past part. cloistered; pres. part. cloistering)  To confine in, or as in, a cloister; to seclude from the world; to immure. "None among them are thought worthy to be styled religious persons but those that cloister themselves up in a monastery."





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Cloister" Quotes from Famous Books



... sufficiently possessed of that all-denying zeal of the Catholic enthusiast to which every human tie and earthly duty has been often sacrificed on the shrine of a rapt and metaphysical piety. Whatever her opinions, her new creed, her secret desire of the cloister, fed as it was by the sublime, though fallacious notion, that in her conversion, her sacrifice, the crimes of her race might be expiated in the eyes of Him whose death had been the great atonement of a world; whatever such higher thoughts and sentiments, ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book IV. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Bouvignes. Our men behave like vandals: everything is upset; the sight of the slaughtered inhabitants defies all description; not a house is left standing. We have dragged out of every corner all survivors, one after another, men, women, and children, found in a burning cloister, and have ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... his [the king's] coming in to the bishop's palace [at Amiens], where he intended to dine with my Lord Cardinal, there sat within a cloister about two hundred persons diseased with the king's evil, upon their knees. And the king, or ever he went to dinner, provised every of them with rubbing them and blessing them with his bare hands, being bareheaded all the while; after whom followed his ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... the greatest stage of all time, and on it placed a lot of little figures, "pigmy minds"—all save one, and he the nearest great, an unworldly person summoned from a cloister, with the vision of genius and the practical incapacity of one who has run away from life, hating men but loving all mankind, eloquent but inarticulate in a large way, incapable of true self expression ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... nun, to be a nun!" he repeated. "You do not know, my child, the life, the misery, which is hidden behind the walls of the convent. You do not know it! I prefer a thousand times to see you unhappy in the world than to see you unhappy in the cloister. Here your complaints can be heard, there you will have only the walls. You are beautiful, very beautiful, and you were not born for it, you were not born to be the bride of Christ! Believe me, my child, time will blot it all ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal


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