Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A council or an assembly of church officials or churches; an ecclesiastical council.
  • noun A council or an assembly.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In the Reformed Dutch Church and in the Reformed German Church of the United States, a body composed of clerical and lay representatives from the classes, having complete supervision of the church and acting as the highest judicatory.
  • noun In the Lutheran Ch., the district council, composed of all the ministers and one lay representative from each congregation in the district
  • noun In the Reformed German Ch., a delegated body of ministers and elders from adjacent classes, subject to the general synod.
  • noun An assembly of ecclesiastics or other church delegates duly convoked, pursuant to the law of the church, for the discussion and decision of ecclesiastical affairs; an ecclesiastical council.
  • noun Specifically In Presbyterian churches, the court which ranks above the presbytery, and either is subordinate to a general assembly (as in most of the larger denominations) or is itself the supreme court of the church.
  • noun A meeting, convention, or council.
  • noun In astronomy, a conjunction of two or more planets or stars.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Eccl. Hist.) An ecclesiastic council or meeting to consult on church matters.
  • noun An assembly or council having civil authority; a legislative body.
  • noun (Astron.), rare A conjunction of two or more of the heavenly bodies.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun An ecclesiastic council or meeting to consult on church matters.
  • noun An administrative division of churches, either the entire denomination, as in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, or a mid-level division (middle judicatory, district) as in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
  • noun An assembly or council having civil authority; a legislative body.
  • noun astronomy A conjunction of two or more of the heavenly bodies.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a council convened to discuss ecclesiastical business

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Latin synodus, from Greek sunodos, meeting, assembly : sun-, syn- + hodos, way, course.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Ancient Greek σύνοδος (sunodos, "assembly, meeting"), from σύν (sun, "with") (English syn-) + ὁδός (hodos, "way, path").

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