hermit
/ˈhəːmɪt
/noun
1A person living in solitude as a religious discipline.Secular idleness would have little meaning in solitude, and the religious contemplation of the hermit or monk is not in question here....
- Valaam, on a beautiful island in Lake Ladoga near the Finnish border, is once again home to both monks and hermits.
- As a form of asceticism, celibacy's heroic demands are more at home with a hermit in the desert or a monk in a monastery than with a priest ministering in today's highly charged sexual atmosphere.
1.1A reclusive or solitary person.Though not hermits or recluses, they do enjoy their own space to ruminate about what makes the world go round not to mention what makes people tick....
- A blogroll shows that you are part of a community rather than a solitary hermit separating yourself from the unwashed masses.
- If you think about people who choose to be solitary, hermits, suchlike, they can have quite deprived environments in terms of stimulation and be very isolated but they do so from choice and, as they see it, for a higher purpose.
2A hummingbird found in the shady lower layers of tropical forests, foraging along a regular route.
- Phaethornis and other genera, family Trochilidae: several species.
- Asymmetries in the character transition curves describing these zones suggest that Townsend's warblers have a selective advantage over hybrids and hermits.
- The pattern of introgression found by Rohwer and Wood predicts that Townsend's males will be superior to hermits in these behavioral measures.
Derivatives
hermitic
- Anti Vampire Club membership ranges from pirates to hermitic recluses to your common garden-variety psychopath.
- His life is saturated by tragedy, culminating in a hermitic existence spent waiting for the death that will free him from the tortured longing for Herman.
- Now I'm going to turn into a hermitic poet, I thought to myself, depressed, and spend all the rest of my days thinking up similes and metaphors and whatever else it is they teach us in English class.
hermitism
- He was found dead on September 8, 1995, after forty years with little output and increasing hermitism.
- At first she pities Seymour's socially retarded, ultra-cynical hermitism, but then it only adds zeal to her seduction strategy when her relationship with Rebecca gets rocky.
- I was in the early throes of a spell of misanthropic hermitism.
Origin
Middle English: from Old French hermite, from late Latin eremita, from Greek erēmitēs, from erēmos 'solitary'.