Sunday Word: Cerement
cerement [seer-muhnt, ser-uh-]
noun:
1 the cloth or clothing in which the dead are wrapped for burial or other form of funeral
2 any graveclothes
Examples:
'She admitted that she had not seen it herself; but her daughter had and seen it so plainly that she was able to describe the cerements of the grave in which it was attired.' Cerements were the waxed cloth used for wrapping a corpse before burial, suggesting the ghost looked very much like a storybook ghost, clad in pale material. (Michael Billington, Weird Norfolk: The ghost of Ber Street in Norwich, Eastern Daily Press, January 2022)
Had not the singer of Wimpole Street said that they were binding up their hearts away from breaking with a cerement of the grave? (Jess Hardiman, Murder mystery book that has only been solved 4 times in almost 100 years, UNILAD, January 2023)
Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form. (Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Masque of the Red Death')
It was a long bundle, as long as a man, and was swathed in cerements of white Egyptian tissue. ''Tis you! 'tis you!' I sneezed rapturously, recognising the object of our search, the very mummy which, two thousand years ago, Theodolitê had prepared with her own fair but cruel hands. (Andrew Lang, He)
There was another darkness about her, thicker than the mere night, like a black cerement dropping over her soul. (Joseph Hergesheimer, Wild Oranges)
Origin:
First recorded in 1595-1605; cere, Medieval Latin cēra literally, wax + -ment, French from Latin -mentum, suffix forming nouns, usually from verbs (Dictionary.com)
The earliest known use of the noun cerement is in the early 1600s. OED's earliest evidence for cerement is from 1604, in the writing of William Shakespeare, playwright and poet. (Oxford English Dictionary)