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CEFR C2 — Proficiency

Charnel

Definition

(formal, literary) A place where dead bodies are kept, especially in a church or other building; a charnel house. Historically, also referred to a vault or chamber beneath a church where the remains of the dead were stored.

Example Sentences

1The charnel house beneath the cathedral contained the remains of centuries of deceased clergy and nobility.
2Is it not a grim irony that the charnel, a place of death and mourning, should be situated directly beneath the sacred space of worship?
3During the plague, the city's charnel houses were overwhelmed with the sheer number of dead, leading to mass burials in the surrounding countryside.
4The discovery of the charnel in the abandoned monastery shed new light on the history of the region and its funerary practices.
5There is something haunting about the charnel, a place where the living and the dead coexist in an uneasy symbiosis.

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