• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Graveyard Vs Cemetery: Is There A Difference?

October 30, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

There are so many questions surrounding death: What happens? Where do we go? Burial vs cremation? What’s the greenest way to go? But today we’d like to tackle the perplexing issue of graveyard vs cemetery? Is there a difference?

You may have heard that it all comes down to placement, with graveyards being specific to burial sites attached to churches while cemeteries could be just about anywhere. However, as a Snopes investigation revealed, this distinction between the two categories isn’t true and, actually, the real difference comes down to a third option and our old friend, etymology.

Advertisement

If we consult the Cambridge Dictionary, graveyard is a synonym of cemetery, and cemetery is a synonym of graveyard. The lack of distinction between the two is reflected in their interchangeable use when referring to burial sites, and the experts agree that there’s little to be said for separating their usage.

“There is little or no difference between a graveyard and a cemetery,” Professor David Sloane, who literally wrote the book on Cemeteries In America History, told Snopes. “Either can be places next to a church (although most of those are called churchyards).”

a cemetery in a churchyard

The presence of a church no longer defines what makes a cemetery.

Image credit: John Corry / Shutterstock.com

As for the etymology, graveyard is a more general term to describe burial sites, but there’s a little more specificity to the history of cemeteries. The word comes from “koimeterion,” which is Greek for sleeping place. It came about in 1485 as a synonym for churchyard, but was later used to describe burial sites off of church grounds when there wasn’t room left to keep squeezing everybody into churchyards.

So, it could be argued that there was once a significant difference between churchyard and cemetery, as cemetery was adapted to represent a version of a graveyard that wasn’t so heavily controlled by the church. By contrast, the graveyard in the churchyard was one eventually reserved for more religious individuals as space allocation became an issue.

Advertisement

If you want to bypass the drama altogether, why not just become compost?

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. No ‘magic wand’ to fix Lebanon crisis, new prime minister says
  2. Nissan plans Mexico work stoppages in October due to chip shortage
  3. A Never-Before-Seen Virus Infected A Man After Circulating In Peru’s Jungles
  4. How Benjamin Franklin Charted The Gulf Stream

Source Link: Graveyard Vs Cemetery: Is There A Difference?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Scientists Perplexed By 407-Million-Year-Old Fossilized Plant That Doesn’t Follow The Fibonacci Sequence
  • This Giant Goldfish Hybrid Weighs As Much As A 10-Year-Old – A Stark Warning About Dumping Pets
  • Scientists Gave Mice Neanderthal And Denisovan Genes. The Results Were Intriguing
  • 2024 Saw Higher Levels Of Carbon Dioxide In The Atmosphere Than Ever Before
  • Halloween Fireballs Will Grace Our Skies As The Taurid Meteor Showers Arrive
  • Newly Discovered Hunting Megastructures Suggest Pre-Bronze Age Societies More Sophisticated Than Previously Thought
  • What Is Spectroscopy And Why Is It So Important To Science?
  • Parkinson’s “Trigger” Seen For The First Time: Scientists Image The Toxic Molecules Inside The Human Brain
  • What Flying Animals Exist That Are Not Birds?
  • DNA Evidence Uncovers Surprising Origins Of Native Americans
  • Single Gene Swap “Transfers A Behavior” Between Two Species For The First Time
  • Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Has A Rare “Anti-Tail”, New Observations Confirm
  • Asteroid Apophis: Animation Shows Asteroid’s Nail-Biting Close Approach To Earth In 2029
  • Titan Breaks A Key Chemistry Rule: What That Means For Alien Life
  • Scientists Studied “Chicago Rat Hole” – They Have Bad News, The South Atlantic’s Magnetic Field Weak Spot Is Growing, And Much More This Week
  • Could This Be The Real Reason Humans Survived And Neanderthals Died Out?
  • Newly Discovered Snail Species Named After Studio Ghibli Co-Founder Is A Hairy Beauty
  • 2025 SC79 Is The Second-Fastest Asteroid Ever Found – And Only The Second Within Venus’ Orbit
  • When Red Devil Spiders Arrived On A New Island, Their Genome Dramatically Shrank In Half
  • Is This The World’s Oldest Story? Ancient Human Tale About The Seven Sisters May Be From 100,000 BCE
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version