Use the word gentile to mean non-Jewish, like the gentile friend you invite to your family's Passover Seder because she's curious about Jewish religious traditions.
- Pronunciation: /'dʒɛntaɪl/
- English description: a Christian as contrasted with a Jew
- Synonyms: non-Jew
- Chinese Translation: 非犹太人(fei1 you2 tai4 ren2)
- Spanish Translation: gentil
- ORIGIN: When Gentile is a noun, it's usually capitalized, and it's most frequently used to contrast a Christian with a Jew. There are other religions that use the word gentile to describe a non-believer, including Mormonism and Hinduism. More generally, gentile refers to a person who doesn't acknowledge a particular god or belief. The root is the Latin gentilis, whose meaning of "fellow countryman or family member" changed over time to mean "foreign, heathen, pagan."
EXAMPLE SENTENCE:
- Which, he said, I am–feeling for the Jewish hands and barely at all for thegentile ones.
- The players, gentiles all, stood in single file, awaiting the man at the head of the line.
*New word description, story and part of "EXAMPLE SENTENCE" are cited in Vocabulary.com